Lacrimosa
by Tripwire Alarm
Summary: A long-forgotten calamity resurfaces to give rise to a horrific plague. A tragic domino effect unearths secrets and demands a sacrifice. Of course, the way he saw it, it's only a sacrifice if you get a choice... O/C pairing, rated M due to graphic imagery, gore/violence, dark themes, strong language & mature content.
1. Breath

**I: Breath**

The adrenaline hangover was only going to keep him going for a little while longer.

This was as close as he'd been to sleeping in days: lethargic and nervous in front of a fire with a mild concussion and a loaded shotgun. Just him, the copper glow, the warm clutch of wood and metal in his hands, a howling winter silence behind the bolted storm shutters. This was rest, a tiny vacation, despite that the pain in his shoulder had its own feverish pulse behind the clever veil of painkillers and his cranium felt full of clouds. Maybe if he pretended that it was really just a storm keeping them here, he could relax enough to drop off for a few minutes. But he needed something to hold him over, keep his brain working, for however long it could.

As it was, with everyone else asleep, or maybe just trying to be asleep, the silence was at least welcome insomuch as it provided opportunity to close his eyes, stop thinking. Only occasionally, there would be a sound. A scratching, a thump of wind driven tree branches against the roof. Nothing loud, just enough that he'd snap out of the welcoming haze of the world between asleep and awake, that enticing purgatory filled with moonlight and fog.

Inside the house, there was a golden diameter of blissful heat from the blaze in the big flagstone hearth, the warm glow of the fire on the scarlet draperies and wooden shutters, the leather wing chairs and woven blankets. Things that could lull anyone into a false sense of normalcy. Of comfort.

But outside, it was dark, nearly moonless. Bitter cold, the Alenhaten canalways all iced over and crusted with the crawling frost and snow. And out there, he knew, those sounds weren't all just wind and leaves.

The need for a long term solution was just one of the troubles rattling around his head like a shaken jar of bees. There were too many. Too many things to worry about, to plan, to keep coming back to… no matter how much he wanted to avoid thinking about them.

How he always ended up in some kind of goddamn leadership role, shit, he'd never know. Even how he managed to get involved in the first place in these kinds of things was in itself baffling. How he'd ended up awake at four-twenty-two in the morning at Stephanie's house with a loaded shotgun and a mess of blood dried stiff into his clothes…well. He remembered. It just didn't seem real, was all. Didn't seem possible.

Really, it was probably better not to sleep. If not just to avoid the inevitable horror, the revulsion that would strike him while he was defenseless against it. As soon as he was asleep, he would wake up sick. Maybe he'd scream. There was no telling. It had happened before.

Not just because of everything he'd seen. Because, once more, he'd just let it happen. He'd arrived too late, and stood idly by while someone important had been taken away, her dark blood on the elaborate parlor rug in the big manor house. All of it now so far away, a hundred miles south, abandoned in their hasty flight. Staring into the flames behind the metal grate of the fireplace, tame and controlled, all he really saw was a ghost of Totokanta's fiery skyline, the corona of it lighting the night sky with blazing topaz, burning in the darkness behind them while they'd fled, like so many others. He could _feel_ it burning in the depth of his empty stomach.

They'd left her behind. Hadn't even buried her.

Yes. He remembered very well how he'd gotten here. The bigger task ahead of him would be to forget. To _try_ to forget. He'd never been any good at that. If only he didn't still have the responsibility to protect others when it was so obvious he couldn't be trusted with that charge.

With a weary exhalation, he glanced down the dark hallway that led toward the stairwell and the upstairs bedrooms. If only he could get blind, blackout drunk. The lingering buzz of shock and panic that had fueled their rushed escape would only carry him so far until he needed something else to hide under. Like the fire pushing back the cold and the darkness, anger had often been his warm solace before, something to push back the fear and the grief so he wouldn't need to wrestle them away himself. For a long time, a simmering, febrile rage had been his lifeline when there was nothing else to sustain him.

It could be again. In a lot of ways, it had never left.

…_**5:46 PM, thirty-six hours before…**_

There was a bright sunset reflected in the windows of the main manor house, which had made it difficult to see when he'd first arrived after squeezing through the typical cheerful, homicidal panic that flooded the streets of the busy port city of Totokanta. People in a crazed rush to be somewhere other than where they were. Mothers towing children through the crowds, people shouting. There seemed to be a rush on the apothecary on 8th Avenue, a crowd was struggling at the doorway, likely piling in for bitters and tisane before the influenza influx that came with the cold northern winds out of the Fenril Woodland. The frost had come early this year.

It was quiet here in the outskirts, in the hills. Standing outside the estate, looking in at the human clockwork of the household, all white gloved hands and sycophancy in place of cogs, it reminded him a summer past where he'd stood under the same twisted elm each afternoon. Looking in at the same elegant ant farm. Waiting.

Now, here he was again. This time in the slowly darkening rose garden. But still. Waiting.

The sun had since set, and the manor glowed golden from the inside from its gallery of arched mullioned windows. A mob dressed in satin gloves and coattails milled inside. Silver platters and crystal champagne flutes, feathers and diamonds, generations of old wealth with liquid gold in their veins wearing jewelry that cost more than most people could hope to earn in their whole damn life. All of it made his stomach swim with a kind of disgusted envy, which he would admit was inherently contradictory if it had mattered at all. Having only arrived back in town, he was almost glad to overlook the nauseating display of the over extravagance and boredom of the filthy rich if it meant he was on his way back to normalcy.

Or, what he considered normal, anyway. Whatever.

As it happened, the youngest daughter of the Everlasting house had an appointment with him. Sort of. If appointment could be taken to mean she would be sneaking out at a particular time to meet up with him and Majic Lin, as discussed when he'd left to work with Stephanie at the newly unearthed Nornir ruins three months before.

He hadn't been informed about any kind of gala the same night he'd told her to be ready if she was coming with them, but probably that would be overestimating the importance of the event. It was safe, in his mind, to assume this kind of thing happened regularly. In and among the clusters of patiently coiffed and polished finefolk, he'd been trying to spot her. He'd seemed to develop a talent for finding her in a crowd, particularly this sort of crowd in which she stood out quite plainly as the most miserable human in the building. Squinting though the sparkling windows, he couldn't discern her. Not until the white set of double doors blew open up on the balcony deck and a set of quick footsteps clacked out on the stone, and through the rose leaves above there was a figure in a pale gown that made an odd, soft clatter of its own, wheat colored hair pinned up in a heap of carefully shaped curls. He couldn't be sure it was her, however, until her voice rang sharply like the echo of a thrown stone in a cavern, which, as it always did, utterly gave her away, despite that it had an unfamiliar inflection to it today. She didn't normally change her tone just to speak to some high breed, like she likely was supposed to. It was one of the things he appreciated about her: she spoke to everyone with an equal amount of haughty, impatient superiority.

"I told you, I just… I don't feel well. At all. I'm not going down." Through the rose leaves, he could see her pulling off a long earring with an almost petulant jerk.

"The Viscountess expects that I at least escort you down after the announcements."

"No one is going to miss me if I'm not there this time, I'll tell her myself. She can't blame _you_."

"I shouldn't think… Cleopatra, it's just _unwise_ to defy your mother this time. Can't you reserve your little rebellion for another evening?"

Up on the deck, she turned suddenly, with interest or aggravation, walking back toward the door where he could see her more clearly, see the young man in his dandies and frills. Christ. Just a scared boy, not even Majic's age yet by the look of him and his shiny cherub face with his oiled hair and cravat who clearly had no idea what he shouldn't say to this one. Cleo would eat this kid alive.

"Grays," she began, using her best persuasive voice. He could hear her heeled shoes, every pointed step. Here was an act that never worked on him, her intimidation factor wasn't much higher than a duck's, and he would be apt to laugh at either. "Do you know something I don't?"

Quack, quack. Below in the garden, there was a rising impulse to chuckle. It was easiest to almost like her when she was being insolent to somebody other than him.

"Know something? Are you trying to imply you don't…" The boy's voice drifted with a note of doubtful anxiety. "Your lady mother wishes to declare my brother's intention after supper."

Now she did nothing. Said nothing but a weak and disappointing, "Oh." In the garden below, he was just wondering exactly what the hell 'your-lady-mother' was supposed to mean.

"On the subject. They…_will_ be expecting your reply."

"It's not really me he's asking anyway, Grays."

"I shouldn't think this is the time to be so selective."

"Just what does that mean?"

"Just that. Cleopatra, the arrangements are made. You _know_ this! Your reply is a formality but my brother will wish to have it."

"What for?" Now she finally sounded angry. In the arbor below, Cleopatra's visitor was starting to get a little irritated himself.

"If the arrangements are _made_, what does it _matter_ if I stand up in front of a bunch of stuffed shirts and say yes or no, Grays?"

"…Because…" Finally the boy showed a little anxiety in a bumbling way that reminded him of Majic for a moment. "It's _you_."

"Because it's me and everybody knows I don't _want_ to get married? Is that why he sent you instead of showing up himself?"

Orphen didn't hear the kid's reply but it was something about propriety, that much-prized imaginary concept the gentry liked to pretend meant anything. There was too much blood rushing to his head to hear properly. He rarely handled these kinds of surprises well. In an inadvertent and abrupt motion, he sat on a wrought iron bench that huddled below the rose-laden arbor, still blooming in the late autumn chill. With the wind kicking up, he felt suddenly colder, even cocooned in his cloak. Maybe like he'd swallowed ice.

Cleo's voice caught his attention again, she was snapping at the boy, Grays. Whatever the hell kind of name that was. She was belittling his reply, ordering him out of her chamber, flexing that vocal muscle a little more effectively than before. This time, it didn't make him want to laugh. But then, somehow, his inexplicable good mood had soured considerably. Why he'd even come here first, he didn't know.

No…he knew why. Of course he did.

He was thinking of leaving, coming back later or letting her come to the Lin's Lodge and Tavern looking for him, when she bore down on him out of the dark like a manic ghost, luciform in her pale beaded evening gown, with gooseflesh raised on her pale arms and a familiar blue jewel pendant around her long neck. Her hasty, seemingly soundless descent of the stone steps could only be attributed to the fact that he'd been distracted, since she wasn't making any effort to be quiet now that she was down.

"How long have you been here?" she demanded, her voice strained with more than anger. It occurred to him a moment late that she was actually expecting an answer, and a moment longer to formulate something coherent.

"Well, I don't know. How long have you known I was here?"

"Jesus, Orphen! You couldn't have had worse timing!"

"_Me_? Sorry, did I get the day wrong or have I just underestimated your fucking idiocy?"

"…day?" The way she looked around, silenced and almost disoriented, all with that unfamiliar sound to her voice, was almost unsettling. She didn't even bother acting insulted.

He squinted at her, standing slowly. "Yes, the day. Today. Like we agreed? You…been _drinking_?"

"What do you care? Shit. Is it really the twentieth?"

That raised an eyebrow. Cleo cursing. It was as good as a yes. He just wasn't sure if it bothered him that she seemed to have forgotten entirely, or if it was just the inconvenience of the whole thing that had him a little riled. Actually, he felt a bit sick. He'd come all the way here, and she clearly was in no way expecting him or ready to leave. To say nothing of the fact she was engaged, though that in of itself didn't upset him so much as just shocked him.

No. That was a lie.

"It's the twentieth," he said. He sounded faultlessly annoyed. Bored, even.

Her little manicured hands went up to her face, wiped at a made up eye, dabbing at the dark kohl with the pad of her fingertip. Not seeing her for three months couldn't account entirely for how different she looked from last he'd seen her. But normally she wasn't dressed up like a duchess or marquise or whatever the hell she was. It made that time seem a lot more like a year. But then, it had been awhile, maybe three years since they'd first met. It would be naïve to claim she hadn't changed a little.

"I'm sorry," she blurted finally. If there were two things that rarely came out of Cleo Everlasting's mouth, it was curse words and apologies. Already they were two for two. "Can…can I just meet you? Later? I just…I don't think I should—"

"Ditch your own engagement party?" He hadn't even meant to say it; it had just flown out of his mouth, unwilling to remain unsaid. Once it had left his mouth, he'd prepared to defend himself against a flying fist. Instead, she was visibly fighting tears, her eyes on the ground. When she looked up at him, she lost her battle, a word snagging in her throat, a makeup stained tear snaking out against her will and dropping down her white cheek.

"What am I going to do?" Her voice sounded like a rusty hinge, her shoulders rounding when she bent forward to catch her face in her hands. It made his palms itch, made him want to grab her shoulders and shake her so she would stop.

"What the hell do you mean _what are you going to do_? Tell them to shove it. It's your life, isn't it?" The whole thing was getting very uncomfortable. He really didn't want to talk about this. Could there ever just be an easy five minutes where she wasn't making him crazy?

To make it worse, she didn't seem at all as prepared for his angry reaction as she likely should have been. Instead, his sharp comment just made a shred of a sob shudder out from behind her clenched teeth.

"Of course it isn't," she hissed miserably.

"Well, for fuck's sake, I don't have an answer for you. I don't know anything about…"

"About what? About marriage? I'll be _twenty_ next year..."

"What about your sister? Shouldn't she focus on her first?" 'She' meaning her lady-mother. The term kind of made his skin want to crawl right off his bones. He'd just as soon compare her mother to a giant spider, except that a giant spider would probably be more maternal. _Why_ was he even having this conversation?

"God! You are so thick! Mariabella has been making her wedding plans for more than a year already."

"Well, how the hell would I know?"

"Because I _told_ you!"

He held his hands up, palms out, to hold back the diatribe she was likely preparing to unload at him. "Then what are you going to do? I'm bringing Majic back to Bazilkok for his rune study. There's no real reason for you to be there." Except for her to be there. Which was the only reason she ever went anywhere with them, really. But it wasn't something they talked about. There were a lot of things they didn't talk about.

In his mind, she was just a cornerstone of normalcy these days, and he had never responded well to change after he became accustomed to something. And he…was accustomed to her.

"Wuh…" she sputtered, "What, so if I don't come with you right _now_ you're just going to leave? What about Majic's _Dad_?"

"It's not my fault you were too busy getting sauced in your room to remember what day it is. What _about_ Majic's Dad?

She looked angry enough to hit him now, which always gave him a little flutter of pleasure for one reason or another. "He's _sick. Sick, _just like half the continent_._ Have you been living under a rock?"

Actually, he sort of had. Four-hundred feet down in the newly uncovered Nornir Chapel just outside of the Bazilkok ruins, translating rune phrases on the tabernacle with Stephanie by lantern light, on contract from the University. He made a doubtful face at her. "Sick, _Bagup_? With what?"

Cleo glared, hugging her arms in the thickening dark. He could smell fading roses on cold breeze, maybe a spritz of some kind of perfume, or maybe it was brandy on her breath. Something sweet and cutting, which was appropriate.

"With what? What else would it be? Weren't you listening, it's everywhere." At his blank expression, she scowled. "You really haven't heard about it? Rhinehold? Haven't you seen a newspaper since you've been gone?"

"I've been occupied."

"I bet," she sniffed resentfully. "Majic's not going to want to leave him just yet. You can't just wait a couple days? Stephanie can't get along without you out there?"

"It's not that she can't, I'd just rather get back myself. It's kind of a big fucking deal, Cleo. All those relics, the temple, there's still an entire rectory to open up…" He paused, forgetting for a moment he was arguing with her. "You should see it."

"I _want_ to see it!" She said it almost breathlessly, dizzy. In a weird way, it made his clothes feel too tight. Like the words had reached out and choked him.

"Then ditch this thing, what the hell?"

"I can't! I have to at least…refuse in person."

"So you're refusing? Why are you _asking_ me what you should do—?"

She wilted. "What else would I do? I don't know how it will go over, but…"

Silence and cold wind took over the dialogue. He watched her hug herself and try to carefully wipe her eyes. Two things that he, if he'd been so inclined, maybe should have done for her. But he never touched her if he didn't have to.

"So who is it you're supposed to be marrying?" He asked, as though he really wanted to know. He didn't. The gods knew why he even had brought it up again.

She answered woodenly, the name tumbling from her mouth like a brick while she looked through him. "Lord Ambrose Farrior."

Why did aristocrats name their children ridiculous shit? Instead of giving in to the sudden thunderclap of nausea sweeping over him, he pushed out a sharp, chilly laugh. "Well, don't sound so excited."

"Fuck _you_, Orphen."

"Ohhh, language, princess."

"If you're just here to twist the knife—"

"No, _I'm_ here because _we_ had a conversation and agreed—"

"Then go back to stupid Bazilkok without me and see if I give a—"

"Well, _shit_, what do you want me to do? Kidnap you?"

"Just wait, okay?" Her voice cracked when she raised it. "Just a few hours. Listen, _I'm sorry_ I forgot but I've had a lot...just…can you _please_ just go see Majic, and I'll meet you there? At midnight, okay? Please! And if Majic wants to go…if he's ready to go then I'll go with you."

He frowned. Cleo never said please. And what the hell would it matter if Majic wanted to go? Why wouldn't he? "You want me to go catch whatever Bagup's got?"

"You really haven't been hearing anything about it?" She folded her arms, tight, her features arranged somewhere between disgusted and incredulous. "How could you _not_ have heard with everything they've been saying?"

He just shrugged.

"Leave it to _you_ to know nothing of…" She cut off with an exaggerated sigh. "Besides, it's not airborne, it's not like he's got a cold. And he's on good medicine. If you catch it early, it's treatable. It's just that the medication is…expensive so… Didn't you pass through town? I practically got mobbed last time I went through. And last week, they burned down the clinic for turning people away."

He thought about the apothecary downtown, the mothers and their pale children. The shouting. He'd chalked it up to the usual urban panic that always repulsed him. Maybe it had been bad enough, though, that he'd noticed any of it at all.

"If it's so expensive, how did Bagup get it? The Lodge does that well?"

She made a face, "How the hell should I know that?"

"Cleo!" A voice from above, past the stone balcony and the open double doors into her chamber. She turned toward it with a jerk, sending herself into a wobble. The right thing to do would be to step out and catch her elbow. Offer her support, especially with the pinch of anxiety on her tear streaked face.

He didn't. She grabbed up her cream-colored skirts in one fist and fired another pretty glare at him. "So? You'll wait?"

He took a breath. Held it_. Held it_. Let it out. Shook his head. "Yeah, alright."

Cleo's glower turned into a smirk. She hauled around, rushed at him in her rustling dress, threw her frigid arms around his neck. Stiffly, he patted her bare shoulder, keeping his eyes off the tiny constellation of freckles there, looking up at the stone wall of the garden instead and riding out a wave of the familiar claustrophobia he often felt when she came too close.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm the best, I know."

"No, you're an asshole. Sometimes I honestly can't stand you," she said, looking up at him, too close, in the dark. And there was that sweet perfume again, the hint of brandy on her breath.

Yes. Definitely brandy.

He pulled a breath into his tight lungs. "The feeling is as mutual as ever. That's not getting you anywhere with me if you think that makes me feel bad…"

"I don't even want to know what would get me anywhere with _you_, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean." Above, the voice was calling again, searching, getting closer. Heavy footfalls pounded on a wooden floor above, and she wheeled quickly toward the sound before jerking back. "Now go _away_! Hurry and de…compose or…"

She really wasn't quite herself. Cleo had probably read more books on sorcery than he ever had. Decompose. For fuck's sake. "Dematerialize."

"Whatever! Hurry up!"

"Then let me _go_."

With a hard blink, she did. He stiffly stepped back into the shadow of the rose arbor and murmured the incantation to translocate, a modified operative assembly incantive phrase. The last thing he saw of the manor garden was Cleo, hurrying back up the stone steps, wiping her face with the back of a porcelain hand and not looking back to make sure he was doing as asked. Usually, she wouldn't trust him to do as he was asked quite so quickly.

And normally, he wouldn't have.

He supposed that he was a bit rattled by the whole thing; the whole rushed few minutes' worth of tense conversation: marriage plans, Bagup Lin with some kind of fever, Lord Ambrose Fucking Farrior, meeting at midnight, that she couldn't stand him. Her voice and her face were both different since he'd last seen her; her with her sculpted hair and painted eyes. It was queer, maybe even disquieting, but despite it, they'd effortlessly fallen into a classic blood-pressure-elevating, palm-sweating exchange. After his absence, it was somehow comforting to know that at least a few things remained changeless: their ability to mix about as well as oil and water, and her maddening sense of absolute entitlement. That and the fact that, for one idiotic moment with her sweet intoxicated breath in his face, he'd been gripped with a sick, twisted yearning to put his hands and his mouth where they didn't belong.

Some things were just a constant.

It hadn't been the first time. Not for any of it. And until she was gone, until she was married off and locked away in her golden prison of wealth and nobility, where he'd never see her again, it wouldn't be the last.

Certainly nothing he couldn't handle.

ooo…ooo…ooo

_To be continued…_


	2. The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

**II: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea**

"Master! This…is it the twentieth already?"

He'd been leaning on the bar for a good ten minutes before Majic trundled up the stairs from the cellar into the warm tawny glow of the tavern, cleaning his hands on a sooty rag, looking utterly nothing like the continent's next powerful sorcerer. Just a kid, not yet eighteen, in a water spotted apron and sweat flattening his corn colored hair from stoking the furnace below. Ten minutes was a perfectly adequate amount of time for someone to sink into a thoroughly spiteful temper, and he'd taken full advantage of the opportunity.

"Let me guess," he scoffed. "Lost track of the calendar?"

"No, just…I'm sorry…" Majic jerked a hand through his damp hair, raking it back in an aggravated gesture that definitely looked familiar. It was funny how different someone could look, not seeing them for awhile. Majic, for his part of it, didn't appear to have slept for most of the time he'd been away. To be honest, he hadn't either. He'd been up late, hours into the predawn, squinting at bas-reliefs, frescoes and carved simulacrums in the cool, humid underground; paging through reference texts, matching obscure contexts and combinations. He'd hated runes in school, but happened to be good at it, like most things when it came to academics. He was all about practical application, theory made his brain switch off. But when Stephanie had first asked, he'd refused. Laughed, even.

But, she knew him. Appealing to some deeper interests, the value of Nornir lore, she'd pushed the envelope. She'd parroted old tropes, those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, and other banal bullshit that had landed on deaf ears before she'd aimed below the belt. Aiming for sore spots as she was wont to do in an argument, she'd argued finally that if more research had been funded in Nornir ruin sites, perhaps there would never have been that tragic accident involving the relics taken from Baltander's Island.

Which, really, thinking back on it, was a downright shitty, absolutely fucking nasty thing to do.

Perhaps—no, decidedly—his life would have been radically different without the disaster that had derailed it into a smoking heap of wreckage. By the time that the accident, or rather whatever had not been completely destroyed by it, had been resolved, both he and Azalie were a good six years older. Childman was dead, the family he'd had at the tower half-dead and half-strangers after so long. Everything that had been before was gone, unsalvageable. Time and life that could not be regained. There was no going back to anything. Not for any of them.

It had taken almost six years to realize that he'd been doing what he had, after leaving the Tower, almost entirely on principle. And that in the end, principle wasn't worth a flying fuck. Principle still left you feeling black and hollow, nursing a bottomless hunger for something intangible.

So she'd manipulated him into accepting her proposal. That was the truth of it. The money had helped soothe his slightly stung sense of pride at being swayed by pathetic, lingering guilt. The money wasn't bad. But none of that had made it any easier getting to sleep, particularly on the camp nights underground.

He watched Majic go behind the bar for a towel, an anxious crease carved between his eyebrows.

"How's the old man?"

Majic looked up with an exhausted smile that didn't reach his eyes, "Oh, you…how did you know? I…I've been so busy, I didn't—."

"So he's alright?" Orphen wasn't much of a tolerant person by nature, but all the same, it was a particular challenge being patient with Majic Lin, even after almost three years of apprenticing him. He'd rejected the Tower's full scholarship in favor of his continued sporadic and disorganized tutelage as though he could really learn more that way, which was frustrating more than it was flattering. But as always, ask the boy a question and he'd stammer all over instead of just answering. His focus and confidence was an ongoing weak point in his studies and his applied exercise. Teaching him sorcery felt like building a fortress on quicksand.

The boy gave an unsure nod, still looking nervous. "He's doing okay. Still weak, you know. He's still coughing, but he can breathe better now, and the fever broke yesterday morning. The doctor said, we caught it soon enough that there shouldn't be too much scarring. Want something to drink?"

Orphen nodded vaguely, still leaning on the bar, wrapped in his cloak, only half listening. The tavern was empty, though a low fire still burned in the yawning stone hearth, all the polished wooden tables vacant and neatly aligned on the polished oak floor, shadowed in the dim gaslight and surrounded by brass framed casement windows still bright with what was left of the bleary red sunset over the eastern mountains. No customers tonight. No patrons, but still the Lins had had enough to pay for the expensive treatment. According to Majic, Iris hadn't left much behind when she'd died, and between the Tavern and the Inn, it was enough to keep Bagup and his son from starving.

Majic worked up a sunny imitation of his usual smile, "Pick your poison, Master. We've been pretty quiet lately, it's nice to have someone in here."

"Quiet because everyone's got this same, what is it, fever?"

"Well, not everyone…" Majic offered up a decanter. "Benedictine?"

"Brandy." Christ. He'd just said it without thinking. Obviously, Majic wouldn't know why he'd asked for it. _He_ knew. It was all he could do not to look embarrassed at what was really a slightly perverted request.

The kid shot him a dubious glance, pouring a tumbler full and sliding it over without further comment on it. "I heard that a lot of children around here have it," he continued.

"Any idea how he got it?"

Majic leaned on his elbows, closing his eyes with obvious exhaustion. "Oh sure. There was a fight in here, about three weeks ago. Dad went to break it up, and one of the fighters, actually the guy who started it, he had it bad. He was drooling all over, his shirt was all wet with it. Just…crazy and…furious for no reason at all, he could barely talk, just like…grunt and spit. That's how they act, when it gets bad. So, Dad's throwing him out, and he bites him."

He took a mouthful of the brandy, flinched. He didn't make a habit of drinking it. It tasted like it smelled, caustic and sweet, like that gust of warm breath he'd been thinking too much about. Three months away, it turned out, was longer than he'd thought. "He _bit_ him? You serious?"

"Yeah. Right here. Dad had his arm around his neck." He pantomimed a fake headlock before pointing out the soft underbelly of his forearm, shaking his blond head with a slow, tired sway. "Somebody ended up shooting him outside a few minutes later, after he bit a couple other guys…which I guess was, you know…probably better than what he was going to go through. But we've been pretty quiet since then."

Orphen let out a long breath that his words rode out on. "Fuck, man. What the hell kind of…disease makes you bite people?"

"Don't you know about it? Rhinehold Fever? It's a kind of infection. It affects the brain when it goes untreated, damages the nervous system and stuff, that's why they bite and attack, like scared animals. You really…" Majic's eyebrows came together on his forehead, his eyes squinting at him like he was too bright to look at, which meant he was gauging him for bullshit. "You really haven't heard about it?"

Orphen rose an eyebrow, eyeing his pale apprentice over the rim of his glass. "I've heard about as much as you've told me. So, what, this all just came out of nowhere since I've been gone? And there's already a treatment available?"

"I'm sure it's been around before this. These things don't just come out of nowhere. I just hadn't heard about it until recently, with it everywhere, you know. But it's getting real bad. Last week, a crowd set fire to the clinic on 17th Street after they turned people away."

"Yeah. Turned away people because they couldn't afford the medicine, huh?"

Majic toweled the bar instead of looking at him while he agreed before assertively changing the subject. "So what's it like in Bazilkok?"

"It's…" Another hit of the sweet brandy went down hard. "Interesting. If you like, you know…if you're not claustrophobic and the whole cycle of night and day doesn't mean much to you."

"You do look tired, Master. Have there been protestors?"

"What for? The site is in middle the deadlands."

"I know, but the Dragon Believers…"

"Oh," He wove a hand dismissively, then used it to shepherd back an untamed handful of hair from his eyes. "You of all people should remember just what level of crazy you're dealing with when it comes to those guys."

Majic leaned on his arm again, blinking those heavy eyelids. "I remember."

"Batshit insane, kid."

"I _remember_."

"In any case, no. No protestors. They denounce sorcery and everything it touches. However that trickles down to protesting the unearthing of ruins, I'll never understand. If the remains of any dragon-family civilization are considered sacred, even if it is the Nornir, you would think they would support it being studied. Particularly something this well preserved. They were saying that the whole place looked like it must have been sealed off suddenly, with the way things were just left where they were. Everything's intact. There's nothing to desecrate, it's not a tomb. Just a lot of religious relics and art. And dust. A whole lot of sacred fuckin' dust."

"I think they want everything to do with the Nornir left buried forever," Majic said softly, looking a little far away now. Probably he was thinking about Fiena, the Dragon Believer girl they'd had to leave behind in Fenril those years ago. Even now, travelling with the kid was like being followed by a puppy, you had to keep a constant eye on him, and women fell over themselves for his attention. It was something about that everything-blond innocent charm, Orphen had always supposed. If he wasn't so sweet and unassuming, the kid would get more tail than he'd know what to do with. The older he got, the more shameless and vexing this problem became.

Not that he was bitter or anything. But for his part of almost three years, he'd barely gotten his clothes off around a woman without feeling like he was doing something wrong. But then, if he thought about it (which normally he didn't), things had been that way a long time. For years, anything that diverted his attention from his goal to find Azalie or the means he took to get there, anything that was for himself, even sleeping, eating, it all triggered an immense and bizarre guilt. Rarely, though, did it completely stop him from doing as he pleased. There had been more than a couple girls willing to follow him anywhere he went if only he'd been honest with them, which he hadn't. All of that had stopped when he'd come to Totokanta and felt the proximity of the sword in the city's masonry.

Strangely, following Azalie's restoration to humanity and his eventual and gradual focus on other things, that sense of guilt had only gotten stronger, less easily ignored or justified away. The last time any woman had been interested in him; it had already been months, hell, almost a year. And the next day, he'd felt hopelessly, inexplicably ashamed of himself. Maybe not inexplicably. Like anything, there was a reason for it.

Okay. Now it was seeming like he might have been a little bitter about it.

He drank some more, only distracted out of his thoughts by a shuffle of footsteps coming through the residential door that opened behind the bar, followed by a deep, rattling cough.

"Thought I heard…a familiar voice out here," Bagup wheezed in the doorway, wearing a thin smile, wrinkled gray nightclothes and a fresh bandage patched over the wound on his forearm. It didn't look right, not at all, and Orphen couldn't pull his eyes from it.

"Dad! Sheez, you shouldn't be up!"

"Hogswallop, boy. I'm feeling good today, and lying in bed ain't getting me anywhere." Majic's old man looked fragile. He'd been robust before, brawny even. Now he looked like a feeble old man in a nightgown with a horrific mess of black tracking along the arm veins, coming out from under that clean bandage. They crawled up past the crook of his elbow and over his bicep, disappearing under the sleeve of his nightshift.

"Just because you've taken the last dose doesn't mean you don't need your rest."

Bagup waved a big hand at his son. "I'm not doing jumping jacks. But I hear you out here talking, and all I've done for weeks is lie in bed and read the newspaper. You didn't tell him that the others that he bit didn't get sick."

"It didn't come to mind," Majic said irritably, turned his eyes. "The others didn't get it. Just Dad, probably because he was bit first."

"What would that matter?" Still, he couldn't pull his eyes off those shadowed veins stretching out from behind Bagup's bandages.

"Saliva," he wheezed tiredly, moving past them to sit at the bar. "Believe me, I've read all about it by now. That's all I've had to do, read the paper, read the pamphlets the doctor left. The infection's carried in body fluids: saliva, blood, you know. Doctor said the other two didn't get sick, that maybe the bites were too dry to be infectious. Not so sure about that, guy was slobbering those big syrupy strings of drool over everybody he touched."

"Goddamn," In a single motion, let the last of the brandy slide down his throat.

"You're telling me. Son, pour me something, huh? I've been in bed for about three weeks, poor Majic's been stuck handling the Lodge business and taking care of me. Tavern's been pretty much closed since all that went down. Where is it you been again?"

"Bazilkok."

"The desert?" Bagup squinted while his son testily clanked a teacup in front of him. "Not quite what I had in mind, Maj."

"I know what you had in mind. But you're getting chamomile. Another, Master?"

Orphen moved his empty glass toward the boy. "About two furlongs past the old ruins, a team from the University in Alenhaten uncovered an underground structure about, oh, six months ago. It's a previously buried arm of the temple structure, a large section that was sealed up. They contracted out for some assistance with the Nornir rune texts in the art once they had it mostly excavated."

"Ah. I knew Majic had mentioned it but…" Bagup shook his head, watching the steaming kettle fill his cup with a weary eye. "My memory's been a little fuzzy from the medication."

"You've got a good son, old man. Taking care of you like this." For some reason, maybe that festering dark wound, he was almost feeling nervous, anxiously compelled to keep speaking to fill up the silence while Bagup unenthusiastically swished around his tea sachet. "Today is the day I'd said I'd come bring him back with me to the dig. They've stabilized the structure enough so no cave-ins are likely, not that any were much in the first place. Majic's been a natural at runes since day one; he could really be part of something important."

What he didn't say was that runes were about the only thing he'd been a natural at since day one. He'd practically had to beat every inch of progress he'd gotten out of the kid. If only his focus wasn't such shit, if he had some damn confidence in the things he knew. He had to talk him up almost every time. It was like having to remind someone that they knew how to walk every morning before they could get out of bed.

"Well, now, Majic, you hear that? When you got mixed up in all this, who knew you'd be involved in some history making?"

"Dad, I'm not sure I should go just yet."

"No, no. I'm mending, son. You go with your teacher. And your pretty friend too, right?" Bagup picked up the teacup in his big, thick fingered hand, brought it up under his graying moustache for a slurp. Even as weak and lessened as he was, it looked laughably like a child's toy in his careful grip. "I don't know what you did to deserve generosity like that, but remember to assure her that we're going to pay her back, boy. If it takes the rest of whatever life I got left in me."

The flushed, pinched expression on Majic's averted face, it said a lot that he didn't. While he was dragging his eyes on the polished bar counter, there was a lot to recognize in that face. It was a face that plainly said that he hadn't wanted Orphen to know that _his friend_ had paid for Bagup's medicine and they were going to pay _her_ back. For whatever reason, the news set him back on that edge he'd been on when he'd arrived. Having information willfully kept from him was something he loathed with a particular intensity. When Majic finally flicked a glance his way, he was sure to silently let him know how he felt about it with a hard, sidelong stare.

Three months away and Cleo had turned into a humanitarian betrothed to some Lord with a ridiculous blueblood crazy bullshit name, and sweetfaced Majic had developed a penchant for quick irritation and secretiveness. He wasn't too sure which of those bothered him the most.

Finally shaking off his indolent embarrassment, Majic replied quietly to his father. "She doesn't _want_ to be paid back, Dad."

"Horsepucky. That's just something people say, son. To make you feel less guilty about having to take a handout, make you feel like they don't got you between the devil and the deep blue sea. S'not something they really mean."

Another drink of brandy; he was getting used to it now. Normally he'd agree that if this was indeed Cleo they were talking about, and really there was no question, that she wouldn't have really meant such a thing, coming from the family she did. But it was just hard to swallow that she'd said it at all. Since when did Cleo care how she made anybody feel? If given a choice between the devil, the deep blue sea, and owing something to Cleo Everlasting, he'd gladly take a chance on whatever the first two had to offer.

Majic was making a face, his eyes still carefully averted, "I don't even know what that means, Dad, but she can tell you herself..."

"Not until midnight she can't," Orphen interjected, his voice caught in the brandy glass, watching for Majic to look over before continuing. "She's got something tonight she can't get out of, so she'll meet us, here, at midnight. Unless you're going to stay?"

"You've seen her already?"

"Yeah." _Something wrong with that?_ He didn't say that part out loud. Just with his face. "You're not staying?"

"Of…of course not." If was like he'd forgotten even suggesting it suddenly. "Not if you want me to go, Dad."

"I'll be fine! I've had my last bit of the medicine. A week ago I couldn't even stand, and look at me now. At this rate, I'll be back at work in a few days."

"_Dad! Please_…at least…"

Bagup was already sliding off the bar stool he'd occupied, clapping one of those big hands on one of Majic's thin, rounded shoulders. "I'm getting back in bed, don't fret, Mother Hen. But come say goodbye before you go, huh?" He stuck out a hand toward Orphen, the universal invitation for a handshake which, despite reservations that had arisen in seeing the old man's half necrotic arm, he uncomfortably supplied. After which, he received a similar clap on his own, less-scrawny shoulder before vanishing back through the door through which he'd entering, leaving what felt like a peculiar, almost awkward silence behind him in the tavern.

The boy, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, piped up first with exactly the subject he'd hope to avoid. "You went to see Cleo before you came?"

"Said I did, didn't I?"

"So…you know about the—uh…"

He threw back the rest of the brandy in his glass, stone faced while Majic watched him. "Engagement?"

"Uh. Yeah."

"She told me. Both of you seem to have forgotten what we agreed on. Interesting that if I'd been the one to forget I'd be hearing no end of it. Been seeing a lot of her, have you?"

"Master. She…" Majic cut himself off, that furrow appearing between his eyebrows again before he looked away, letting out a gust of breath he presumably had been holding. He shook his head. "If we've got until midnight, you want to use a room? You could take a shower, maybe get some rest?"

Orphen blinked at his apprentice. And now Majic was changing the subject mid-sentence like he wouldn't fucking notice. Like he was stupid. Firing him a warning glare on reflex, he nodded at him, closing his eyes and rubbing a gloved hand over his face in a single rough motion. Taking his mood out on the kid was something he routinely regretted later, and Majic hadn't had the easiest time of things while he'd been gone. He wasn't _trying_ to rile him up. Not that it was that hard to begin with, like poking a tired, hungry animal with a stick.

"Tell me something," he said. "Why didn't you mention Cleo'd gotten the medicine for your old man? It's nothing to be embarrassed about. You should be thankful she came through for you both. She's not normally that reliable."

Majic turned around, his eyes once again downcast in the low, oily gaslight. "I didn't bring it up because of how she got it, Master. Her…fiancé, his father is the doctor who brought the Rhinehold treatment into town; someone her family knows from way back. And…I wouldn't have thought you already knew about the marriage so...I thought it would upset you."

Suddenly, another drink sounded like a good idea. Pushing the empty glass out in front of him, he replied. "Why would it upset me?"

"I don't know," the kid shrugged uncomfortably, his shoulders coming up in miserable slow motion toward his ears while he uncorked the decanter again. "Just…it seemed like the kind of thing that would. I'm not…I'm not that happy about it myself. _She's_ not happy about it."

"Is she ever happy about anything that isn't her own idea?"

"That's not it…" Majic finally refilled his tumbler with a cagey glance. "Master, she's been here almost every day since…she's…she can't…she doesn't know what she's going to do. How can they _make_ her marry somebody?"

"She said as much," he said brusquely, his always thin patience whittled down to its skeleton. "Don't know why either of you seem to think I've got the answer for her."

Majic was silent again, saying more with his shifting eyes than his mouth again, but nothing Orphen's mildly inebriated brain could translate. He was going to offer to go out back and fire off a few practice shots with the kid, blow up a few barrels, charge up some bolts, but he didn't get a chance. Without another word, Majic with his exhaustion shadowed eyes and a bizarre but plainly angry grimace, turned briefly to the wall, then slapped a room key on the bar in front of him with heavy hand that had all the finality and closure of a punctuation mark.


	3. Parable of the Lion

**III: Parable of the Lion**

He'd intended on, as the boy had suggested, getting some rest. For weeks now, perhaps just after all the time spent in the dark, dusty underground of the buried temple, every time he closed his eyes and managed to sleep, he'd dream of the ocean. Sitting on the white sand, like that on the beaches far on the eastern coast of the continent. Sparkling white with high, eroded chalkstone cliffs, the surf roaring up and creaming on the breakers. He'd watch a woman in a blue sundress play with her young children in the ankle deep water, plucking up pearl-backed shells under the echo of the seabirds.

Upon waking, there would be a creeping sadness. He'd half thought, perhaps, it might be some childhood memory. He didn't have many from before the orphanage in Laindast. Three or four at the most. In one, he was running in the snow with a dark-haired girl, an older sister he didn't remember. There was a heavy legged tabby cat laying on a stone floor. A bearded man laughing in a wooden kitchen chair, a half-built frame of a birdhouse on the table in front of him. Fragments of dreams or memories, things maybe he'd just made up in his sleep.

In the Lodge room Majic had loaned him until midnight, all he could do was stare at the pine paneled ceiling, watch the fireshadows jump on the floor. Sleep would not come. Even with his eyes closed, kicked back in the worn reclining chair in front of the fire with his boots off for what felt like the first time in a week, he had to tamp down a twitching reflex that made him want to stand, bounce a knee, pace the floor.

If he did sleep, if he did dream about the ocean, Cleo would be there. In a wedding dress. Maybe crying, sitting in the sand. Crying because neither of them could do anything about it, and because he'd be too late even if he…wanted to.

There was nothing to be done about it, anyway. Such was the reality of the aristocracy. He'd known something like this was bound to happen, sooner rather than later. It was, in fact, more than remarkable that she was even allowed to do as she pleased, had been allowed to travel with him and Majic for as long as she had for what amounted to no reason at all except for that she wanted to be around and…because _he_ wanted her around.

He couldn't sleep with his stomach sloshing full of anxiety and brandy. All he could do was sit, stare at the fire and sink deeper into alcoholic indolence. On his empty stomach, he'd probably had too much. He was high strung by nature and had a weak stomach, and when he drank, his brain did bizarre things. Stupid, twisted emotional bullshit. It didn't make much difference when nobody was around.

Nobody was around now. If he wanted to bury his face in his hands and scream, this would be the time to do it. Get it out of his system now, before he saw her again; before he saw anybody.

But, no.

People, they were all wrong about this feeling, love, if that's _really_ what you wanted to call it. That's what _he_ wanted to call it, sick to his stomach as it made him. Love. There really wasn't a better word, though the term, it was so watered down it barely meant anything. People professed love or hate for mundane things: kinds of food, music. It was unacceptable to him on a certain level how a concept that had been so diluted could still acceptably define something so...crippling.

He loved her. For a long time, a year or more at least, he'd loved her in at least the way he understood the concept: an intense, irrational addiction to a person that had no basis in any kind of reason or reality. Only the gods knew _why_ he did, how he possibly _could_, but he did. It was about the last thing he would have ever intended.

There was nothing beautiful and pure and warm and fulfilling about it. It was the worst thing, _absolute_ worst thing that had ever happened to him. It was a black hole in the pit of his own stomach, pulling everything in with ruthless gravity; a creeping weed that had been slowly growing inside him, strangling everything, rotting him from the inside. A feeling of being eaten alive. He'd fought it with logic, but logic was just something in his brain. Something his brain made up. It crumbled like a sandcastle under this greedy, eating tide of want.

Yes. Without question. Only love could possibly feel this insufferable. He wanted to starve it to death, wanted to strangle it.

It was ugly. Selfish, covetous, vicious, unyielding; a feeling of slow, willful starvation. It made him think, want, _need_ the most warped, though patently atypical things. All it did was perpetually wound, agitate and aggravate him, rob him of his focus and his resolve. Like a splinter imbedded too deep to pluck out, the thorn in the lion's paw. It made him weak. Made him want to beg for someone to take it out and rid him of it.

She was the thorn.

It was pathetic. _Deluded_. And still, he'd held out for this long. At times, it felt like the only thing inside him: this death-clenched grip on some vague principle of pride and decency. Where that had even come from, he didn't know.

In books. In songs. In everything, love was this hallowed concept. A shining beacon of humanity, the only thing worth living for. Or dying for. A man would sacrifice everything for it.

The way he saw it, it's only sacrifice if you get a choice. He didn't—never had—any choice in the matter.

There was no doubt in his mind...they were better off as they were. As long as he got to see her, could be close to her to feed his sinister fixation, it was a compromise. Until all this, until this evening, he'd thought it was better than acting on it; ruining the nice little normalcy he'd built or never seeing her again. He knew from experience, taking a chance and sacrificing everything in the process of reaching out blindly for a childish, irresponsible desire...it just ended in loss. Acrimony. Sometimes, it really was better to appreciate what you have rather than risk destroying it. It had taken a lot of grand failures to learn this lesson; after all, he'd made a lot of mistakes in his life. Sometimes it seemed like he'd never made the right decision, since he'd been born. Not even once. Like he had some kind of natural talent for miserable failure.

Feeling…anything…for her. That was one miserable, catastrophic mistake. When he thought about it at all, which he tried desperately not to do but consequently did often, usually late at night after the fire went out or by the greasy flicker of a past-midnight lantern, his conclusions were the same. That really, no matter how anybody looked at it, it was the biggest joke in the world: the fact that with all her sleepwalking, she'd crawled into bed with him more times than he could really count and that if it had been any other woman, _any other woman_, he would have just taken it for what seemed almost like a goddamn _invitation_ but he couldn't. Just couldn't. Couldn't even touch her.

Because he fucking liked her too goddamn much. He cared about her and her stupid little nonsensical fucking feelings.

If things were different, maybe he would've told her a long time ago. She'd never know about it, and that was probably better anyway. Her continued interest in him could only be lumped in with her fascination for all things from which she was supposed to stay away; things out of her reach. Cleo Everlasting was a forbidden fruit aficionado if he'd ever seen one, and he had a list a mile long of obvious reasons why she would hang him out to dry once she got what she wanted and decided it was time to run after something else.

It was the biggest joke in the fucking world.

Half reclined in the chair, he just watched the little fire he'd built in the corner hearth, leaning his face on one hand, elbow on the sagging chair arm. He didn't scream, didn't break anything. Didn't do anything but breathe evenly out of his mouth, catching the shaking air in his gloved palm while the influence of alcohol on an empty stomach took an authoritative hold.

Really. He shouldn't have had so much. He had no one to blame for it, except for himself. And well, her. He could often find a rather convincing reason to blame her for just about everything. It wasn't always a stretch.

Maybe he should have been thinking about Bagup. The nature of his illness and its sudden appearance among the population was disturbing news, certainly, only made worse by the necrotic infection branching from the wound, stretching like dark lightning across the old man's skin. He was only alive now because of medicine he couldn't afford, apparently couldn't even hope to afford, brought to him by an unexpected angel…

Or. Perhaps he should have been considering Majic. Tired, irritable and short-tempered like they were goddamn related or something, scowling at him when he refused to get wrapped up in his fretful gossiping about…well, or he could have been annoyed at Hartia, always running late, who would likely be showing up around the same time now as…

Fuck. It wasn't like she even wanted to get married.

Instead of watching the fire, he leaned back, closed his eyes. Sometimes it was nice, nostalgic even, to pretend that when he shut his eyes, the world actually went away. There was a time when he was very small and in the orphanage, before the Tower and late nights in firelit libraries studying elemental physics and somatic projection, field tests before dawn in the vicious Taflem winter, that he had thought that it did. That he could shut his eyes and the world would disappear. That when he couldn't see it, it couldn't hurt him.

Right now he wished he could believe that, just for a few minutes. But somewhere behind the artificial darkness of his eyelids, someone was knocking on the door.

He'd hoped for sleep. Cloudy, cool sleep to make him feel like, just for awhile, he was that ambitious young boy still in possession of that kind of helpless childhood innocence, instead of this petty, despondent mess.

How long had he been sitting there? An hour, maybe. Squinting at the wall clock revealed nothing but a blur, so apparently, not long enough.

He took a long moment to stand, his inner ear protesting his head's change in altitude and balance with a quick fit of alcoholic vertigo. In the doorway, when he finally reached it, a robed man with a wind tangled mop of auburn hair cast him a grim smirk in the bright, polished oak corridor before elbowing unapologetically into his temporary lodging, giving him the usual up-down evaluating glance before speaking.

"Well, you're in one piece, at least."

"What were you expecting? You saw me this _morning_."

"One never knows with you. You look awful. After all the time you've spent in the dark lately, maybe you should take more sun."

"Maybe you should take more strychnine."

Hartia finally cracked a smile, "You headed out into that madhouse?"

"Unh? No…"

"You've got your cloak on."

"…it's cold. Fire hasn't been up long."

"Ah." Hartia breezed past him, sat himself in the chair by the fire that Orphen had formerly occupied. "I knew I was late, but...no one seems ready to walk out the door. Majic's down there cleaning the _floor, _for chrissake. We planning to wait until morning now? Might be smart."

"Hadn't originally," he said evenly, with trouble, before developing an involuntary, doomed smirk. Like a man smiling over the fact he had cancer. "Majic should be packing. Cleo's the one holding us up with her engagement party."

Well, that hadn't wasted any time coming out of his mouth about as soon as it could. He blamed the brandy; his third was half empty on the mantelpiece, catching the fire light and glowing a poisonous-looking amber.

Hartia, for his part, seemed unimpressed with his perfectly engineered detachment and his rusty eyebrows rose before he let out a lungful of air through his mouth, turning to look into the happy flames leaping behind the iron grate. "Shit," he said finally. "I'm sorry."

Orphen prickled. Hartia had always known him a little too well for either of their own good, but he'd never admitted anything and would keep that particular bit of the truth unspoken until they dropped him in his grave. "What the hell for?"

"Well. Not…sorry…I guess. I don't know. You're not upset?"

"Should I be?"

"Well," he said again, bringing a boot up to rest on the little brick fireplace, scratching awkwardly under the wool collar of his cloak. "It's not as though you haven't got a reason to be…"

"If you think I'm going to ask you what that means, you're mistaken. Because I don't want to know." The hell he didn't. What the hell _did_ that mean?

"Who is she marrying?"

Orphen put his hands on the wide mantel, stared at the crumbling fire with a dispassionate gaze. "Some vapid aristocrat," he said tiredly. "Who else?"

"You do _sound_ kind of upset."

"Next subject, Shrimp Man."

"Krylancelo."

"Hartia."

"What do you intend to do?"

"Nothing." He spat, reaching for his drink, casting a sidelong glare toward his visitor. "Why is it so many of you seem to think I can do something to stop it? Or that I would? This kind of thing was going to happen eventually. It's actually amazing she's been allowed to get away with what she has for as long as she has."

"And that doesn't strike you as odd?"

"What?" He said this into the rim of the bar glass, his voice echoed out of it.

Hartia's mouth curled up before he leaned forward conspiratorially, his elbows on his knees. "That nobody seemed to care much what she did and now this?"

"Of course they didn't like it. But remember who you're talking about here. She does what suits her."

"And she can't do that now?"

Orphen shrugged petulantly. "How would I know? She can't run around with us forever. No reason for her to do it anyway."

"And yet she does. And you stopped complaining about it ages ago."

"There any point in it?"

"Not much. Like you said, she does what she wants. And that's likely what she'll do now. She doesn't want to marry some high society fop and she'll find a way not to. How many of those've you had?"

"Not enough, I guess. I'm sure Majic would be glad to offer you one down at the tavern," he hinted.

"And you're drinking in the dark with your cloak on because you're not upset."

"I'm not fucking upset. Angry, maybe. Because it's not right. _Hartia_. Okay? It's not right, forcing your child to…marry some pencil dick just for the status or the assets or…whatever the fuck the reasoning is..." With every expletive, the fricative grew gradually harsher, until he was practically spitting.

"Yeah, my mistake, I can tell you're not upset."

"Don't be shitty." With his hands back on the mantle, Orphen closed his eyes a minute, setting the empty glass hard on the wooden top. He sighed, deflating all the air out of him before he spoke again. "How's everything at the site?"

"Same as ever. They opened up the western rectory this afternoon."

"What, did they do it the _moment_ I left? They start the excavation?"

"Don't need to. They were over cautious about the structural integrity, you can't blame them. Something sitting undisturbed and perfectly preserved for a couple thousand years, they don't want to crank it open and cave it all in."

Orphen sneered. "Yeah, they just wait three goddamn months to crank it open the second I'm gone, apparently."

"Well, they haven't started in on it yet, Krylancelo, if that makes you feel better. There were some issues after opening it, some of the workers caught some dust or spores from the room and had to be taken to the hospital. Stephanie said it's pretty typical to see that kind of thing. So, there's a plus side to not being there and your timing is to be celebrated."

"Sounds great. More damn disease. I already washed my hands three times since arriving and seeing what kind of shape Bagup's in."

"I think you must be the only person on the continent that has no sense of humor whatsoever."

"I have a sense of humor…when there is humor to be sensed."

"Are you drunk?"

"Not particularly."

"I see that. What kind of shape _is_ the old man in?"

"Looks like he crawled out of a grave. Apparently he was bitten a belligerent customer a few weeks back while breaking up a brawl, and contracted some kind of fever from the bite. If _that_ doesn't make you want to swear off taverns…"

Hartia's ever present half-smirk suddenly vanished, dropped off his face, dissipated like smoke in the wind. "He was bitten? _Jesus_, he hasn't got Rhinehold, has he?"

Orphen blinked at him. "Think that was what he said…"

He stood from the chair, spooked from his relaxed position, pulling together the open collar of his Tower robe with an anxious twist. "How long has he got?"

"He's on the upswing, from what I understand."

"No one is ever on the upswing from that. There's only two kinds of Rhinehold patients: very lucky or dead."

"Then he's lucky. Seems they started treatment quickly enough."

"_Treatment_? You're kidding me. Majic's Dad? They running a gambling hole in the cellar or something?"

"Not that I know of. Don't strain yourself trying to figure it out, I did the same thing. Turns out Princess Everlasting deigned to come down from her tower and save the day on a whim by bringing the medicine to them when she heard about it." Hartia's increasingly incredulous face was starting to annoy him.

"I still don't get it. She just happened to have it? Just a vial lying around the ol' mansion?"

"Don't ask me. This isn't the sticks, they've got pharmacists in Totokanta."

"Not ones that can make the Rhinehold treatment, they don't. They've been manufacturing it over in Meverlenst just the last couple of weeks. You really haven't heard about any of this? God, Krylancelo, it's only been on the front page of every paper for at least a week."

"Well, why didn't you mention it? Next time say, hey, read this crazy shit."

"I did, in so many words. Twice. You really don't remember? You were sitting at the table… Are you kidding? You have to be kidding."

"So you were saying about this medicine?"

Hartia pushed out a hard sigh. "It's more of an antibody than a medicine. It ships for special orders, three days by express, on ice, from Meverlenst, and it's perishable. Problem with all that is, from what I've _read_ anyway, once actual symptoms appear, it's practically too late to treat it successfully. Apothecaries can't keep more than a few in stock at a time, in cold storage. None of it's too reliable, so it's gone rampant in the countryside."

"Heard a mob burned down the clinic here not long ago."

"For turning people away?"

"Something like that."

"Was that before or after Cleo shows up with the treatment?"

Orphen blinked heavily, firing him a distasteful grimace. "Not sure. You're a little over invested in this news."

"You're a little under invested."

"I'm just trying to stay out of it. Something you're increasingly incapable of."

"That antibody is something people are getting murdered in the street for. There were riots in Masmaturia, for chrissake. Cleo strolls across town with it in her pocket and gives it away. And this doesn't spark any interest in you?"

"She's an impulsive idiot. Always thinks nothing can happen to her. She didn't think it through. _Huge_ surprise."

"What's it like in that mashed up brain of yours? One second you're sulking over her and the next you're insulting her."

"You're making up the part where I'm sulking in your head. And listen. According to the kid, the stuff came from her fiancé." After saying that, he felt like rinsing out his mouth. He wished he hadn't finished the brandy so quickly. "He's got something to do with it, his father…something like that."

Hartia looked wary, stepping backward to glance out the window, letting out a low breath that held a muted, wordless sound of anxiety and doubt. "You going to tell her?"

The question prompted another heavy-lidded blink before he reclaimed the chair by the fire, leaning back to stare at the wooden beamed ceiling. "Pretty sure she knows."

"She _knows_? What did you say?"

"What? Why would I have to say anything?"

"You just expect her to figure it out by herself?"

"Why would she need to? What are we talking about?"

"Cleo."

"I…I know _that_, just—"

"Really. How many of those have you had?"

Dragging a hand back through his hair with a ragged sigh, Orphen shook his head. "I don't know. Two. Or three. Does it matter? She got the stuff though him, why would I have to tell her the guy's father has something to do with the medicine trade?"

Hartia outright scowled. "You wouldn't. Jesus, Krylancelo. I was asking if you were going to tell her you're upset she's going to marry someone else."

"How am I supposed to know with you switching subjects like that? And what the hell do you mean someone else?"

"Are you going to _tell her_?"

"I don't have anything to goddamn tell her, Hartia."

"I've never seen someone so pigheaded in my life. Both of you. You're the two most contrary human beings I've ever met."

Orphen closed his eyes, his head still back on the worn tweed wingchair. The room had taken to shifting around him with a slow, nauseating tilt. Maybe Hartia was right about the alcohol. As a rule, he didn't actually drink too often. It was too damn expensive for what one traditionally got out of it: an hour of happiness followed by a six hour migraine. Tomorrow was obviously going to be one of those days he'd wished he'd started Majic on translocation sooner. He wasn't ready to go more than a few yards, much less all the way to Alenhaten, which was a day or more on foot at least. It was best not to include Cleo in the scenario at all. Best because she likely wasn't going to show up at midnight or anytime afterward; there was no real reason to expect her to.

"I see you're conveniently ignoring me now."

"Are you still here? Didn't we talk about leaving tomorrow? Why don't you go down and get a key from Majic? I'm not sharing with you."

"Listen…I know maybe—"

"You must be pretty upset about it yourself, seeing as how you keep coming back to it." He opened his eye a crack to look at Hartia, now just a ginger smudge in the half-light, then closed it again. "If you're carrying a torch for Cleo you'd better get over there and let her know it, if you're not too late already. Not sure her mother will be thrilled, though."

"Lord. Only _you_ would suggest something like that. Azalie was right about you."

Despite best efforts, that caught his attention more than he could stand. Orphen brought his head up, squinting. "Azalie was right about me how?"

Even though he couldn't see him, not really, he could hear the scowl in his voice as he was headed toward the door, the quick rhythm of his bootsoles on the wooden floor. "Nothing, Krylancelo. Forget it. Enjoy yourself."

From the way he slammed the door behind him, it was a safe bet that he'd meant that last bit sarcastically. It was a small disappointment; he really had wanted to know what Azalie had been right about. It was a carryover from years past, a knee-jerk reaction to any mention of her. If she had talking about him, even now that she was safe, a mother now, purportedly living at the Tower though he hadn't been back to see her. His reaction seemed to upset Hartia, despite how much he should have expected it. It reminded him oddly of Majic, earlier, scowling and passive aggressive, slapping a room key down hard on the bar counter, seemingly resentful that he didn't have some kind of plan to save Cleo from a fate that he was fairly sure, once she got used to the idea, wouldn't be as objectionable as she was insisting. Every one of them, one way or another, angry at him for things he couldn't change. Hartia had asked him, much as Majic had implied, what he intended to do about Cleo's impending marriage.

Nothing. That's what he'd told him. It was what he was allowed and able to do, as he understood it.

It didn't matter what she wanted. What she thought she wanted, anyway. It was likely to change with the direction of the wind. Poverty and scrounging and not eating for days; she was fine with it as a novelty. Because every few months, she could go back home. She could return to her comfortable, high society reality for a vacation from the hardship she willfully insisted she wanted. And as much as the idea infuriated him, each time, he just waited for her like a fucking idiot. Like a dog.

After all. There was no likelihood that she was going to want to schlep around the continent, sleeping on the ground and in cheap roadhouses and nearly getting herself killed or wounded on a daily basis for that much longer. She'd have her fill of it and leave on her own course eventually, though she'd admittedly held on longer than he'd ever expected she would.

Looking back, it all would have been so much easier if he just had left her in Totokanta after he'd gotten out of the sanitarium. After the Baltander's relics had nearly killed him in the process of trying to set right what Azalie had set so wrong. At the time, he'd told himself it had been because she had his Tower pendant, which was about the only thing he owned that meant anything to him, and he'd stupidly, in a strange moment of delirious pain and a lingering electric intoxication after dealing with white magic, left it with her when they carried him away toward the Tower infirmary. At the time, he'd been fairly certain he was going to die and hadn't really planned ahead.

But he hadn't left her in Totokanta. Couldn't, even then. He'd returned for the pendant as much as he'd returned for her.

Like he'd told himself before. Things were better this way; this was the only way that made any sense. She'd forget about him soon enough, and he'd eventually forget about her. The thorn would fall out on its own, given enough time.

Standing up, he wandered to the mantel for his drink, only remembering it was empty once he got his hand wrapped around it. It was a disappointing feeling. He could see the regret in his own face, reflected back from the dark mirror over the mantelpiece. There were shadows under his eyes from too little sleep. His hair was getting too long.

He'd learned it best from the demon-sorceress herself; Azalie's clandestine quest for Master Childman's notice had brought nothing but ruin and pain to everyone she knew. Love was nothing if not selfish, even in its most generous form it was still self-serving at best. Obsessive, black and conniving at its worst. It made a human being do consciously insane things, like some kind of parasite. Like a raging, mind-eating fever, like that black mess eating its way up Bagup Lin's arm. He might have preferred a disease to this ugly, unreasonable ache that had no treatment at any cost.

It was a kind of love that had driven him from the Tower. It was love that had fueled the years that followed, full of blood, lies and deception: a slow devolution from the ambitious, bright boy with a future of power at his fingertips, _the boy he had been_ into the person he had named Orphen in a wallow of subversive self-pity. Without his quest for justice, without an ultimate goal to work toward, he'd really just been dragging his feet for two years, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do now that Azalie was returned to herself and Childman wasn't around to flip him assignments the Tower didn't want to touch. It was almost funny that all he'd wanted during those years was to see her, to be around her again, to talk to her. And now that she was all right, that everything was generally all right, he hadn't seen her much since. Once or twice. She was still half-angry at him, at the world.

And it was love, a vicious, coveting, completely misguided and heart-rotting kind of love that made him pick up the empty brandy glass, without thinking, and with a hard, swinging hurl, pitched it into the fireplace where it exploded in a burst of violent twinkling music.

He stood and stared at it, then sat on the floor, watching the glistening scatter of glass on the stone bottom of the hearth, not heating up or melting or glowing red hot. Just shining up at him for as long as it took for the fog to lift and be replaced with an evil, pulsating headache and a leaden, self-loathing brand of depression.

Not fifteen minutes later, he had just turned off the hand-pump shower to another sound; another kind of pounding that wasn't in his head but rather in addition to it. Someone at his door. He had to unhappily answer in a towel.

It was Hartia again, the grimace carved deeper on his face than it had been the hour or so before when he'd left, standing out in the polished oak hallway that reflected the warm gaslight and lit up his disheveled red hair in a way that made him think of fire.

Before he even had a chance to ask, Hartia said, "Shit," then elaborated on his displeasure, the sound of what might have been a gunshot echoing up the corridor from somewhere behind him. "Get dressed, would you? You're going to want to come downstairs."


	4. Dies Irae

**IV: Dies Irae**

He was only halfway between down from the first stairwell, hastily dressed with half-laced boots and wet hair when the muffled tangle of voices began to separate out, become more clear. The first one he recognized was Bagup Lin, who came into view in the entryway of the tavern in his wrinkled sleeping gown and shearling slippers, his legs formed a sturdy shoulder-width apart that would serve him well if he had to fire the shotgun he held firmly in his big hands.

"—nothing about it here," Bagup was barking. Maybe he'd already fired once. He pumped the shotgun as punctuation, spitting out an empty shell casing onto the scuffed wooden floor with a dull, tumbling cling, like metal popcorn. Orphen stood back at the foot of the stairs, shrugging into a jacket, a standard issue black rawhide from the Tower he'd somehow ended up with during his time in their sanitarium. This was likely in no small part to be attributed to his theory that the Tower felt a continuing sense of responsibility or obligation toward him, and seemed to provide quite a lot upon his periodic visits. It was either that, or the fact that they'd been courting him to return ever since he'd semi-reconciled with them. That particular hatchet was about as buried as it was ever going to be, with Master Childman dead and Azalie, after all she'd done to ruin it, returned to their halls. The gods knew what he they would expect him to do there, but he was certain, without knowing any details, it would be something at least partially disagreeable.

Or he could have just swiped the jacket from Hartia, which would explain why it was a little snug across the shoulders.

"What do you call that scar eating up your arm, old man? This building is just as tainted as you are, it's got to come down!" A gawky kid in a longcoat was yelling in the doorway, the crowd behind him amplifying his confidence and rage to a fever pitch. They restlessly roiled behind him like storm clouds, a churning mob lit with kerosene lanterns, which was just a smidge short of torches and pitchforks in his estimation.

"I call it none of your damn business, son. The hell are you people doing?"

"None of…! You keeping this place open, covered in your infectious disease…that isn't any of our _business_?"

"He's been treated!" Majic finally rushed at the door, obviously picking up on the growing hostility in the doorway, all seemingly directed at Bagup. "He's not infectious to any of you, he never _was_! Leave us alone!"

"Never was? Look at this kid; he's some kind of expert." The guy snarled at Majic, his ignorant fear pumped up into overconfidence as was so easily achieved in such a young man. "That piece of shit doctor tell you all that?"

"Doctor Farrior _treated_ my father, he _said_—"

"_Doctor Farrior_ is a goddamn charlatan!" A bearded man half-shouted, cutting forward in the crowd somewhere behind the gawky kid. "Whatever you had to sell to pay for his so-called treatment is just the price of trusting that no-good Meverlenst swindler!"

"Three-thousand sockets for one vial and it didn't help Lindsey one bit! She only got worse!" A stricken looking woman cried out from behind what might have been her husband. "It's just snake oil!"

"You must have _caught_ it _too late_!" Majic insisted ardently, pressing further forward. "That's not the doctor's fault! It's not _our_—"

Bagup was waving Majic down with one hand, "They won't hear it, Maj, save your breath." Somewhere beyond the door, there was the sound of glass breaking, more percussive shots. These people weren't the only restless group of mourning souls out tonight with this ill-advised motivation.

"Where's the doctor now? Eight more dead today alone, where's your doctor with his miracle treatment? He doesn't know any more than we do!" The lady, Lindsey's mother presumably, was in tears for probably the hundredth time that day from the sound of her ragged voice. A dozen agreed uproariously behind her. There was a gust of cold wind that shifted clothes and hair and the discordant, dull sounds of raised voices far down the open street.

"You people are exposing everyone who comes through here! Don't you feel any responsibility for the _dead_?"

Majic protested, but his words were swallowed up in the rancorous swell of concurrence and embellishments that rose up from the crowd.

"The only cure for the devil's plague is fire!"

Orphen bent his neck to one side, then the other, closing his eyes against his headache and the shouts flooding further into the gaslit tavern. Leaned against the bar, Hartia threw him a curious look that plainly questioned if he planned on involving himself, which, until now, he had been hoping he'd have a choice in. But, as with so many other things, he didn't.

"Fire?" he asked sharply, approaching the throng in the open doorway with a step that seemed to grow louder when a hush fell over the group at what he could only assume was his appearance. He'd never blended in well around Totokanta in any case. It was all agriculture, countryside and family owned shipping ports that dated a few hundred years back, all those blonde, blue-eyed, alabaster skinned western children passing down the farmland generation after generation. Even the sorcerer's guild in town, tiny as it was, was populated with nothing but these lily white westerners that looked nothing like he did: black haired, dark eyed. But Totokanta wasn't the boondocks, they saw their share of both sunbronzed easterners and sorcerers. But the looks these people gave, as usual, it wasn't the look of resentful awe reserved for the descendants of the Nornir. It was the fearful gaze used to look on a stabber. A killer.

_Look at you. Everything about you has the word stabber written all over it. _

_Krylancelo, you never could kill anybody. _

"Now, that sounds a little bit like a threat to me," he continued with a smile that bordered on unkind, hands buried neutrally in the pockets of the Tower jacket, ignoring the taunt of voices from the past that bubbled up in his aching, brandy-marinated brain. Throwing a look over at the bar, where Majic was radiating palpable apprehension and Hartia, ever the spectator, smirked from the sidelines. As squeamish as he'd been about trouble when they were children, in the last couple years he'd really developed a morbid taste for the amusement generated via the misfortune of those who crossed his old friend's path. "But maybe I'm jumping to conclusions."

The young man at the front of the rabble, ungainly and surly in his poorly tailored topcoat was predictably the first to reply in a shrill voice that did little to disguise his nervous furor. "It's not a threat, it's a promise."

"Oh, a promise. A promise to burn down an old man and his son's home and livelihood. Yes, my mistake, so much more noble than a threat." He kept walking, passing Bagup with his shotgun and stopping in the doorframe, pulling his hands from his jacket pockets to brace himself on either side, the jacket front opening like a theatre curtain. The kid's eyes dipped down at the flash of metal revealed there, a winged dragon curled possessively around a dagger: the distinctive adornment only worn by a scholar of the Tower of Kiba. After a moment, that generated the same kind of expression he was used to seeing in a loudmouthed boy's eyes upon seeing it. Not that he was really a boy. For all he knew, they could have been the same age. Could have been born on the same damn day, but in comparison, just in the amount of life; ugly, cold, misfortunate life that had been lived between the two of them, he was just a boy. A child who didn't know the gut twisting pain of a five day hunger strike or the splintering depression of renouncing every ounce of personal morality in exchange for a chance at surviving just another week or two. The startling bottom-barrel price of a broken soul.

"Listen," the boy said, as evenly as he could muster, his voice strained with anxiety and resentment. "I…I don't know what somebody like you is doing in this place, but this concerns our people's safety. It's nothing to do with you."

Orphen made sure to get just a little too close. Close enough he could see the dirty seawater color of the kid's eyes and smirk at the way he tried in vain to lean back to a more comfortable distance.

"'Fraid it does have to do with me. Unfortunately for you, quite a lot, in fact." He moved his eyes up over the boy's grey-blonde head to the group behind him with their lanterns swinging overhead. More than a few faces had traded in their anger for recognition. After all, he'd spent nearly a year periodically drinking in the tavern between teaching Majic and his lookouts on the southern hillock facing the Everlasting house, watching for the Polkano's signals as had been the agreement: their cooperation for a fair reduction off their substantial loan note.

They still owed him at least a couple thousand sockets. The little shits. Hadn't seen them in months.

Regardless, it was inevitable that there might be a few locals who had run across him during that time. He just so happened to know he wasn't that easily forgettable, at least in comparison with the common folk one happened upon in Southern Totokanta.

"Lucky for you, boy, it looks like some of your friends aren't quite as bad-mannered as you are."

"_B_…?" A few others, other long armed graceless youths had wrestled up through the crowd and were pulling at him, murmuring at him. Calling him Levi. Mentioning 'the Lin kid' under their breath, filling him in. He also heard a smothered word that sounded like Everlasting, which edged his irritation up a notch.

"And?" Levi wheezed with the kind of petulant embarrassment unique to young men. "What's he going to do? If that's true, maybe these bastards should be more concerned with the Manor, huh? Instead of guarding some pathetic old moonshiner and his flophouse—"

In a breath, he had the kid by the neck and swung him to the floor, the back of his head thudding as solid and heavy on the floor panels as a wooden block while part of the crowd pulled back and the boys surged forward to defend Levi, who was coughing on the floorboards under Orphen's half-laced boot. With one arm extended, palm out, he spat out an invocation while Majic tugged his father away from the door jamb. "I tear thee, Heaven's wall."

The boys, even Bagup and Majic, staggered from the concussive force; some dropped with their hands up to their throats. That reaction was always interesting, how the human body's reflexes brought their hands up as though they were being choked when he'd merely removed the air they were trying to breathe. Already it was rushing back with a sucking sound, refilling the unnatural vacuum, but they were still reeling with the breath robbed from their lungs, down on their knees and elbows, wheezing and curled on their sides like puppies.

Kneeling, he put his weight on the ball of his foot where it rested on Levi's collarbone. Others rushed to pull the boys up under their arms and drag them out like ragdolls and apoplectic children holding their breath. He didn't bother taunting the boy much, he was already seething and he'd already had rather enough of him.

"Maybe I didn't hear you. What was all that you said again?"

Levi glared and panted, grinding his white teeth without reply. He wouldn't be reasoned with. With his boot, Orphen applied more pressure until the boy groaned.

"To hell with you! People like you are the reason this is all happening, why can't you leave good people alone?"

"People like me, huh?"

"Yes, like _you_," he kid accused hotly. "God damned warlocks. You're all abominations, and now your people have gone and dug up the Heavenly One's temple and let out the plague that killed all of them so it can kill all of us! Nothing's ever enough for any of you!"

Levi bucked under him, pushing up with his legs before Orphen forced him back down, dropping his knee hard into the boy's gut but ignoring the derogatory slur. He'd been called worse. "Somebody's been pumping your head full of bullshit. You're putting sorcerers on the hook for an outbreak? You country people will believe anything."

Majic was recovering from the hit with fringe energy, slumped on a barstool and trembling with a glass of water and eyeing his Master's interrogation with an anxious distaste while Bagup, remarkably resilient for what he'd been through, was back in the doorway chasing the stragglers back, and he shouted back into the tavern over his shoulder before firing a thunderous shell up into the air outside, sending the remains of the crowd scattering.

"Maj! Get up! _Majic_!"

Holding the kid down—hell, looking at him he might have been as young as seventeen or eighteen—Orphen watched his apprentice, roughly the same age as Levi here, shamble to the doorway with his half-full tumbler of water and woozy expression only for the glass to plummet to the ground with a small wet explosion when he looked outside to where his father was calling his attention, which immediately spun back into the tavern. "Master! _Cleo's_…!"

From the ground, Levi gave a wheezing laugh that sounded like something leaking. "I told you, you dumb bastards—you should have been more concerned with your friends the Everlastings. _And_ your good doctor."

With a handful of his collar, Orphen casually pulled up Levi's head and whipped it down against the floorboards with a resounding knock, snarling down at him with every trace of his marginal good humor frosted over in a familiar murderous chill. "What the _fuck_ did you people do?"

The kid blinked up, staggered by the blow, all his hard-forced courage knocked out of him and his lips working fruitlessly. Orphen pulled his head up again and slammed it harder, then leaned close to hiss in the idiot kid's face, "_What did_ _you do_?"

"Krylancelo…" Hartia's shoes had appeared in his vision, standing above them. He was telling him it was enough. He didn't have to say it out loud. Just saying that name was enough, as if this kind of knee-jerk brutality didn't prove over and over again that there was no more Krylancelo. That he could never be Krylancelo again.

Krylancelo didn't buckle under the weight of his rage. Krylancelo didn't _have_ any rage. Only cold skill and calm determination, a need to excel. To impress. To _belong_.

Orphen let go of the boy remorselessly, leaving him stunned and prostrate without another word. At the doorway, his stomach twisted before it dropped through the floor. It wasn't really any wonder Majic couldn't get the truth of the situation out of his mouth. Just visible on the horizon above the downtown rooftops already diamond dusted with a rind of frost from the cold evening fog, along with much of the north end of the city the Everlasting mansion was radiant through the milky haze, what looked like its east wing inundated in brilliant flames burning a bright hole in the wintry night.

Just for a moment, he stared at it dumbly before he stormed back indoors to snap up his cloak from the barstool where he'd dropped it. "_Bagup_! You got enough shells to keep this place from burning?"

The old man patted the leather satchel he had slung around his neck proudly, the gun still braced on his hip. "More than enough."

"Majic…stay with your Dad."

"Master!" The boy lurched forward in objection, following him to the doorway with a face pinched with an obvious and crushing fear. "I _can't_ just—!"

Orphen was out the door already behind Hartia, shouting back in, securing his heavy mantle at the throat with a fierce glare. "You can't just _what_? Help your old man keep this place standing. We need someplace to _come back to_ for fuck's sake."

Before Majic could voice another protest, his Master was running down the chaotic roadway with Hartia close behind, and in a bend of light, they vanished into the thickening fog.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

He'd overshot the landing by running, resurfacing in the dark rose arbor on the vast mansion's west side and careening into a hedge behind Hartia, who was already sprawled on the cobblestones with a busted lip, spitting blood and climbing back up to his hands while Orphen dodged him, sliding hard into the garden wall before tearing up the stone steps to the second floor balcony only to find the double doors locked and the chamber beyond dark, seemingly unoccupied. Swallowing back the temptation to knock on the window and call out her name like an idiot, he hauled back a leg and drove his heel into the left door, sending it slamming back on its hinges with a jarring crash.

Inside, it was dark and expansive, an oil lamp burning at a low orange smolder beside a great mahogany canopy bed swathed in pale gauzy drapes, the dim lamplight only enough to see that the bed was vacant, still made and piled with useless throw pillows covered in stiff decorative fabric and stupid gold tassels. He was squinting around testily when Hartia finally made it through the door behind him.

"This Cleo's room?"

"Must be."

"You don't know?"

"Never been inside it. Do you see the fucking door anywhere?"

Hartia was casting him a doubtful look. "You've _never_—"

"I create thee, small spirit." The resulting bright burst lit the massive bedchamber, everything done in draping scarlet velvet like a giant jewelry box, carved dark wood molding and golden brocade wallpaper. Near the massive door, a familiar set of luggage was packed and leaned against the wall, waiting. A pair of chandelier earrings were dropped on the bedside table by the lamp, and they held his attention hostage for a moment, forcing his memory to see one of them pendulant from Cleo's earlobe as she threw her arms around his neck in the rose garden, only a few hours before when everything was normal, if not _all right _in her estimation.

_She_ had better goddamned _be all right_. Swallowing past a tight knot rising in his throat, he held the light in stasis with a clenched fist, swinging around to head through the door with Hartia close behind with that inquisitive air huddled thick around him.

There was an acrid haze of smoke gathering in the abandoned hallway. Holding a fold of his cloak over his mouth, Hartia half-shouted through the handful of wool, "You've never been inside this house?"

Orphen glared in the dark, stalking down the highly-wrought passage filled with crystal light sconces and heavy framed paintings, flinging open doors and glancing inside with his lingering light spirit following his hand and replying in a muffled rush. "I've been in the house. In the entry, downstairs. The sitting parlor. Not up here. I don't know where anything is. Place is goddamn enormous. Maybe we should split up."

"Maybe everybody's already evacuated. I think the last place we should be is upstairs."

"Probably, but…"

After a few minutes more of empty, smoke filled corridors and dark rooms, the main stairwell was gaslit and as thick with eye-stinging smoke as the fog outside. Crumpled at the top of the stairs, a man was laying dead in his tailored jacket and evening vest, his flat black eyes staring half-lidded at the ornate chandelier above the stairwell, his throat a mangled pile of viscera, the starched collar below soaked through with bright wet crimson. The wound was still bleeding.

"Jesus," Hartia coughed, pushing his handful of cloak closer to his face. He hurried the last few steps to the stairs before reeling back a bit when the others became visible. There were others. Two more, a woman and another man, stretched down the stairs where they'd fallen. Collapsed with still-bleeding injuries, much the same as the well dressed man: vicious, still-seeping neck wounds. The woman had another on her bare bicep, a gaping chunk of flesh and stringy muscle ripped off at the bone, all the blood staining her pink satin ensemble and the carpet below, and Hartia backed up while Orphen crept closer, peering through the thickening smoke, his heart galloping in his chest, breathing as evenly and slowly as he could stand despite the ticking clock and the scene in front of him and the implications that went along with it. It wasn't that Hartia couldn't see. It was just that he hadn't said it out loud when he'd noticed it.

"They're fucking teeth-marks. _Bites_."

Hartia just looked at him, still holding the handful of his cloak over his mouth. After a long moment of presumed mental analysis, Hartia's voice came, decisive and sharp even through the muffle of fabric. "Krylancelo, we're getting the hell out of here."

"Yeah, well…" He leapt down a few of the steps with his gloved hands gripping the carved cherrywood banister, dodging the bodies on the stairway and a litter of them in the downstairs main corridor, where the smoke was less intense for the moment. With the fire in the opposite wing, the smoke was rising, and it seemed they weren't the only people taking advantage of that law of physics. In the first floor landing, a slowly shuffling man with an armful of what looked like fine linens sneered with a set of shining, bloody teeth and did something he hadn't seemed capable of at first look: he ran at them.

Hartia, his anxiety visible, threw his hands out, his voice stained with his truncated incantation, "Darkness!"

The man dropped his load, wailing with a bestial sound of agony, clawing at his face as though it would clear his sudden blindness. He'd only just torn into his flesh, drawing blood, scratching at his screwed shut eyes with his fingernails when they ran past him, only to find the scream had brought an influx of others. Two more men and a woman, a house maid with a blood spotted apron. She shouted wordlessly, running at them with an almost mindless enthusiasm with the men right behind, her heels snagging on the rise of the corridor rug and staggering. Orphen watched with a swiftly mounting horror while one man took hold of her arm to bring her back up, and in the same motion, sunk his teeth into the fleshy rise between her shoulder and neck. Now she screamed.

The other man cried out, dropping a box of gleaming silver cutlery and prying wildly at the biter as he tore in again while the maid wailed. He screamed and called for the woman by name, Babette. Babette screamed, tried to kick.

"Johnny, _no_! Stop! _Stop_!" The man's voice was breaking up while he screamed, pulling at his friend while he clamped his jaws down like a rabid dog.

They all knew each other. One second they'd been a group, the three of them. Raiding the place, it looked like. But one look at Johnny's bandaged-up arm showed he'd been bitten already, who knew how long before and now suddenly he was tearing into Babette enough that she wouldn't survive to share the same fate. The man, his face wet with tears or sweat, ripped a hunting knife from his belt and impaled it between Johnny's shoulder blades once, tore it out and sunk it in again before Johnny let the girl drop and cried out himself with his mouth full of blood and meat.

Down on all fours, he went down with the blade sunk into the back of his neck. The man, his friend, let out a mournful kind of sound and Orphen took a handful of Hartia's cloak, cursing, pulling him hard in the other direction. Somewhere upstairs, there was another distant, gravelly scream that shrank to a sobering and deceptive silence. They ran, pushed open doors. Found nothing. Nothing but splintered wood, overturned chairs and bleeding corpses; some in diamonds and some in worn street clothes.

The entrance hall was a mess of bodies. Those bitten, others plainly murdered for biting with their smeared bloody jaws open and drooling wet. Saliva and blood on the carpet and smoke in the air, the smell of burning wood and copper, twitching shadows thrown on the walls from the bright gaslight. The main entry doors, once all elaborate wood and cut glass, were shattered and shifted on their massive hinges, seemingly rammed in by the same kind of wild mob as had reached the Lin Tavern, though with a unmistakably more violent agenda and clearly, with more than a few of the badly infected come for…

Come for the doctor or come to steal the treatment themselves. One or maybe both.

Now the house was burning the same as the clinic they'd told him about, the clinic who had turned patients away. The ill who could not afford the serum they needed to survive. In the rush of adrenaline following the chaos of the home invasion, somehow the afflicted had turned in masse, sinking their contaminated teeth into horrified party goers and their own comrades. In its own way, it made a horrible kind of sense, because right now, nothing else did.

Coughing, running, they rounded the corner into the parlor, its wide open space lit by a roaring fire in the great stone hearth, gas chandeliers still burning happily for all the guests that had scattered out like cockroaches in the light. But there were a few stragglers, those who hadn't made it out, in both high priced aristocratic finery and dirty rags: invaders and those invaded upon. Visible from the doorway in a limp pile beside the grand piano, decorated highly with its gleaming framed daguerreotypes and lit candelabras, there was a small crumpled body that drew Orphen's watering eyes, made his stomach wring dangerously from the bright blood soaked down the front of her evening gown and the visible, still wet wounds. The snapped up, torn out mouthfuls of missing flesh.

The gaping wounds, the copious blood on the cream colored gown and the undone cascade of pale blonde hair pooled around her head on the stained floor.

Her name jumped to his mouth, but he couldn't move, couldn't speak. His knees were locked, his hand clenched white-knuckled on the doorframe. A swift invasion of cold, withering nausea held him in its thrall while he stared at the beautiful, bloody little blonde body and felt, for one solid moment, like he was fifteen years old and shouldering open the door into Azalie's Tower bedroom with his pile of books to find her doubled over and gasping with the relic sword impaled through her, begging him not to see what she'd done.

_Don't look! Krylancelo, don't look!_

But he had to look. Now, the same as then, he had to see the scene that would burn itself into his mind and poison everything, slowly ruin him from the inside out all over again.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

To be continued…


	5. Sacrifice

**Content warning to readers: **Some people might find this chapter a bit gory. Just so you're aware.

**V: Sacrifice**

There was a cold, crushing feeling in his chest, urging him closer while a gnawing horror held him at the doorway. He hung back, his ears ringing with the thunderous rush of blood crashing through his veins while Hartia came up behind him, speaking low and fast, saying they had to leave. That maybe she'd already gotten out.

He said this, not looking. Not really looking. They'd seen enough by now, that they were all just bodies to him the same way they'd just been bodies to Orphen until a minute before. Static figures without names, objects of horror but nothing personal. He didn't stop talking until Orphen dropped his head, pushing the heel of a palm against one eye to steady himself, not hearing a word.

"-any longer than you really are out of your mind," Hartia was saying, voice fading reproachfully, casting a paranoid glance over his shoulder before following Orphen's unblinking gaze into the parlor and going very still and silent, then looking back fast, away from the sad butchery and back to his companion with a sudden and intense concern. He watched him swallow back acid in his throat with his eyes closed, then reopen them to stare back into the horrific landscape of the happily lit sitting room before moving forward with a measured but stilted slowness, keeping his back facing the wall in classic Tower training fashion. He slowed then knelt, dropping down next to the small, bent body beside the grand piano and staring desolately down at the familiar face, now as he'd never seen it before: blanched pale, waxen and still almost as though she might be asleep, a princess in a child's fairy tale. It was impossible to know how to feel. If he should have been thankful that her face was placid, that it showed no pain; or if he should be boiling with fury. Or if he should be relieved that the little blonde beauty wasn't who he had feared.

He wasn't any of those things.

It was Mariabella Everlasting. Her neck had been punctured at the carotid, ripped open and her life emptied out down her pale dress, onto the high pile moquette carpeting of the sitting parlor where she'd once wrapped his wounds after his fight with Azalie, in her less reasonable form. It was that day, having seen Mariabella mill about the mansion for almost a year through his vigilant watch of the estate, keeping tabs on the sealed Tenjin sword and when he might obtain it, that Cleo had arrived home from her boarding school in Meverlenst. A year of watching without incident before Cleo had charged murderously from the house with the very sword he'd been seeking, ready to cleave into him with it. The more difficult things in life always seemed to find their way across his path. She was no exception. In fact, she was the embodiment of the rule.

Azalie had chosen that most excellent moment to appear. He'd done little more than protect himself in the fight that ensued with the crawling horror that had consumed his once most trusted friend and family member, his everything, and afterward while he'd dwelled upon his failure and his misery, Mariabella Everlasting had wrapped his wounds in the manor's parlor. She'd been worried for him. And, better that Cleo should never know, she'd kissed him goodbye when he'd left.

Now, she was a rotting heap of flesh in a ready made funeral pyre, her once rose colored lips white as worms. A carcass. It would be useless to test for a pulse. He could plainly see she'd stopped bleeding. It probably had only taken a minute or two. The pain would only last half as long.

And who else had been here to see it? Around her, the other fallen woman looked much in the same condition as Mariabella, below one of the large picture windows was a man, collapsed on his side. His face and jaws were bloody, his eyes staring along the floor, glassy and revoltingly bloodshot, already rheumy in death with the back of his common tweed waistcoat and stock soaked through with blood, large flat holes sunk into the fabric on his upper back, each stained with spread out circles of red. He'd been stabbed, over and over like a voodoo doll. Probably until he'd gone down.

From the doorway, Hartia coughed, looking sick and harried, his arms wound around his own abdomen, waiting for confirmation that this was what it appeared to be at first sight. The fact that it was not, though, meant little. If anything, it just strengthened a steadily swelling discomfort that was crawling up his spine; he could feel it in his bone marrow, his teeth. It felt wrong. Something felt flesh-crawlingly wrong.

Orphen, looking down on Mariabella's corpse, at her still-open eyes blank as marbles staring across the floor, shook his head a little. Her arm was reached out, her bloody hand loosely fisted around something inside. Dropping back down, he pushed open her limp fingers to find a key. Large and brass with a hollow barrel like a tiny pistol, a filigreed head covered in engraved ivy, an ornate letter E, and sticky, still-wet blood.

The idea of her running through the house, trying to get out, gripping the key that would free her... Something hot rose in Orphen's throat and he forced it back down, and a cough came out instead. The room was filling steadily with smoke as the fire grew, climbed through the vast network of wooden beams and corridors toward them by the minute.

"It's Mariabella," he finally told Hartia, trusting his voice not to expose the stormy tangle inside. Hartia's face betrayed him, creasing deep while his head dropped forward, a fall of auburn hair obscuring his face while Orphen woodenly watched him and imagined lovely demure Mariabella running through the parlor, retrieving the key to open some back door or cellar. Helpless and elegant Mariabella, ever calm and hopeful, who'd always done exactly as a woman of the Everlasting breed was expected, was well-read and soft-spoken, a master of ballet, music and equine sports. She never would have a chance to defend herself against an attacker to begin with, much less a drooling lunatic driven mad by a bacteria-eaten brain. He had to have some hope that Cleo, a champion fencer and antagonistic all the way down to her bones, might have had at least a fighting chance to get away. He trusted her belligerent wiles enough that she'd at least go down swinging, even if the thought made him physically sick.

Cleo would never have left the house without her sister. Because as ornery and bossy and irritating and wholly spoiled as she was, she was fiercely loyal and determined and loved with a foolish and impractical intensity and _oh fucking God_, where was she?

She was still inside the house. Still here to be found. Mariabella wouldn't have been running to escape without her sister any more than Cleo would leave her behind. But they'd been nearly everywhere…everywhere that wasn't burning, and from what he knew, the eastern wing was the dining room and kitchen, conservatory and the servant's quarters. It was where the Polkano brothers had stayed in their stint as employees of the Everlasting Estate. It was the absolute last place she'd be. They'd already run through the abandoned ballroom on their way to the main hall. All the guest rooms they'd kicked open, there was no one. Nothing under the beds but darkness and dust. Nothing in the wardrobes but clothing and linens.

Usually, he was so good at this. Finding her anywhere, everywhere. Spotting her in a crowd of a hundred people, he always seemed to run right into her like she was his opposite magnetic pole and now he couldn't find her in her own house. Coughing, he surveyed the parlor and entry hall again, squeezing past the doorway where Hartia was alternately covering his mouth with his cloak and wiping his face with it. The front hall was deserted, only the busted open front doors letting in fog and gusts of cold air carrying flecks of frost, a newly falling snow whirling in the pale, cloud-muted moonlight. The frigid wind wouldn't keep the smoke clear for much longer, and the fire would spread, consume all of the luxury and memories that had been lived in this house. Staring back into the parlor, the fire in the great flagstone fireplace, his eyes gone soft focus from exhausted shock, something stood out in high relief even from far away. On the wall behind the piano, close to where she'd ultimately fallen, a frantic painting of her bloody handprints on the wallpaper and molding on one side of the narrow closet door. He'd seen it opened before, it was where they kept the piano music and instruments, the tuning kit and accompaniments. Why she'd be opening it in her last moments, already bleeding profusely from the look of it…

Orphen pushed past Hartia again, the second time in a matter of a minute, swerving around the bodies at a full run to the cupboard with the bloody handprints on the wall and the knob, which wouldn't turn. It was still locked. Locked, but Mariabella had the key.

With only a heartbeat of hesitation, he dropped down beside Mariabella's body to fish the key from her outstretched hand, then turned to sink the little brass barrel in the small closet's yawning keyhole.

It fit. He turned it and jerked open the door, only to be greeted by an arcing flash of metal and a powerful pain: a kitchen knife sunk halfway into his shoulder with a panicked, frightened battlecry. Orphen grimaced, grunted a hard, wordless growl through clenched teeth, glaring down at his small blonde assailant, stashed away in the closet with a bloody knife and an expression of remorseless, terrified antipathy and zero recognition before he swore at her and forced her hand back. Instead of easing the blade out, she yanked it back hard with both hands, ripping more flesh with another nonsense sound of overwhelmed fear.

He wasn't sure what happened next. The world spun a moment, tilted viciously under him and time lost its sequential order for a heartbeat. It could have been the intense pain or all the smoke or the adrenaline but probably all of it together. First she'd stabbed him and then she was clutching him, saying his name into the wool snarl of his cloak over and over like a chant, and he held onto her a moment, because despite the breath-stealing agony and his mounting apprehension, the warm, breathing jumble of her in his arms was…the only important thing for just a minute.

But a minute was more than they really had. He drew back to appraise her, her appearance having undergone a dramatic change since their last meeting hours before. Her carefully made up face was a smear of mascara track tears, her cream-color gown ripped, spotted with blood. He pried the knife from her clenched fist, the wound already bleeding down his arm inside the jacket sleeve with disquieting speed, hot liquid surging down his cold skin. She seemed to regard it all with an awkward, eerie detachment. As though she couldn't recall how a knife had gotten in her hand, or even what it was.

"Are you bit?" He asked her intently and she just stared, her eyes glassy and empty like a doll's. He had to ask her again, give her shoulders a tiny jostle to get her attention, spell it out a little more. "Cleo, god_damn_it, _have you been bitten_?"

Finally, she shook her head dumbly, reaching up to her own face at wipe at her cheek. "Maria…" she whispered, her eyes growing wider as the clouds seemed to clear from her head a bit, and then she lurched forward so he had to catch her, now saying her sister's nickname with a frantic, calling sound as though she would receive an answer. "_Maria_…!"

The sad reality poured over him like cold water. That she hadn't seen. Oh God. She hadn't seen.

She didn't know, not for sure though it was clear that she'd made the connection when he'd asked her about being bitten, and he couldn't pull her back far enough in time to keep it from her eyes. He caught her before she hit the ground, going down on his knees to turn her away but was too slow to compete with gravity. From the way she was screaming, she could see everything. She could see too much. Orphen tugged her back, turned her, caught his arms around her but still she screamed and thrashed to get to Mariabella, screamed "no" even as she completely broke down and tightened her arms around his neck, weighing him back down, quaking with an uncontrollable tremor, overcome by a flash flood of unendurable grief and sobbing in a hysterical, violent way he'd never heard before. She might as well have stabbed him again for the way it felt to hear it. Convulsively, he sucked in a breath at it, and coughed.

"Come on, there's nothing to do here," he told her, fighting to keep his voice gentle as he could make it but it came out a little rough, his clean hand cupped on the back of her neck. He didn't have time to let her cry right now. "Cleo, the place is _burning down_. Where's your mother?"

She let out a broken, keening sob that was nearly another scream, her hands tightening on him with a tangible desperation, going ever more limp in his hold on the floor. It told him enough, and Hartia was shouting at the doorway, the crash and thunder of his impromptu sorcery growling like an earthquake, echoing from the entry hall. They had to get out. All of this grieving for the dead had to wait or they'd all end up joining them quite shortly.

"Alright," he whispered, holding her up. "Then we've got to go now. Come on, stand up. Come on."

She was sluggish to respond, gone half-catatonic in her now silent, panting open-mouthed, her breath hot and wet on his neck. He dragged her to her feet, pulling the length of cloak around her bare shoulders, leading her forward only to find her limping. She was grabbing at him just to stay up, still sucking breath through tears, her thin shoulders drawing up and jerking with mostly soundless misery. They'd barely reached the doorway where Hartia was now sweating, winded. He turned wild eyes to them.

"It's not natural," he wheezed. "They don't stay _down_."

"Why are you playing around with them? Put some goddamn power into it," Orphen snapped, towing Cleo, marching her forward with one arm tight around her while he threw the other out in front of him when he reached the open doorframe, the glove and bare fingers on that hand running with his own blood. "I erase thee, demon's footprints!"

Hartia swore at him, shielding himself from the fallout from the resounding shockwave that tore across the already ruined entrance hall, flooded with what could have been fog or smoke and whirling flecks of snow, cracking the rose-marble pillars and flattening the stair landing with a whipcrack of ferocious sound.

"Krylancelo, bloody hell, we are still under this roof!"

Orphen didn't respond. He was too busy watching the limp ragdoll piles pull themselves back up into the hobbling shapes of human beings; broken bones, dislocated joints, popped eardrums and all. "They don't feel pain," he exhaled. "They'll just keep coming until they can't move anymore."

Hartia gave him a glance from the corner of his eye, watching the shambling horde regroup itself. There had to be at least ten, and despite that it seemed to stagger them, slow them down, not even a shockwave of that magnitude would keep them on the ground long enough that they could run through without the possibility of being lunged at, swarmed by these blank-eyed men with their bloody faces and diseased, dripping teeth. It wasn't a chance anybody would take. "Why wouldn't they feel pain? They're _people_. They're still people."

With a glance over his shoulder at the bled-out blonde corpse of Cleo's sister, a kind of writhing anger starting to work its way toward the surface, Orphen gave an anxious, sibilant half-laugh at the near absurdity of the comment. "You sure about that?"

Somewhere upstairs, there was a crashing. Beams falling. The structure crumbling with them inside, cornered in the parlor, so close to the front door. So close to freedom and clean air and the sane world. But even from the entrance hall, even assuming they got out of the damn building, braving the foggy breadth of distance between the estate and downtown, dragging Cleo the whole way sounded like a surefire way to ruin their chances of getting back to the tavern unscathed. If there were this many inside, these mindless animals bent on snapping up a mouthful of their steaming flesh for no reason he could scarcely comprehend.

There was no better solution. He wasn't risking any more than he already had in doing this, and he was losing blood, maybe a lot of it. It was rolling down the inside of his shirt, down his chest, soaking everything. He could smell it. His headache was going to turn his brain to oatmeal, his eyeballs were going to melt. He might not even have had the time to go on foot before he shut down.

"I'm translocating her."

Hartia coughed hard into his hands, tall and thin and pale and ultimately unintimidating as he was, he affected an impressively baleful glare when he wanted it enough. "What the hell would you do that for, hasn't she been through enough?"

"No choice. _Go_, Hartia!"

"Krylancelo—!"

He bent down, cheek against Cleo's, his mouth near her ear so he spoke softly. "Breathe in and hold it. Don't let go, okay? _Look_ at me."

Orphen pushed her back, just enough to see her face, wet with mascara-stained tears under her elaborate pile of pinned curls. For a frustrating second that felt too long, she stared, her eyes wide but unfocused, as though struggling to wake up from a dream. With a reticent nod, she inhaled, filled her lungs with smoky air and held it, her shaking arms still tight around his neck.

"It's not going to feel good, so I'm sorry. I can't carry you out of here and not be able to use my hands the whole way. I'm sorry."

Still in her haze, she nodded again, her face buckling and she pushed forward, weeping again, clutching harder around his shoulders like he was going to dive into the ocean with her and, on some peculiar impulse, he dropped a kiss on the crown of her blonde head, somewhere hear the hairline before he spoke again, fighting the concentration-obliterating pain with a slow exhale and hard swallow.

"I dance in thee, mansion of Heaven."

Somewhere between here and there, he heard her gasp and cough, letting go of her held breath a bit early at the shocking, nerve-rending thrill. Though he'd expected her to scream, to claw at him. Being forcefully transported, especially to someone without the right blood, wasn't an especially pleasant experience, but then, neither was being filleted with a kitchen knife so he supposed they were somewhere close to even in that regard. Or not.

In a breath, they were in the cobblestoned street outside the Tavern, which was still there and thankfully not also on fire as half the north end of the city appeared to be. And while Cleo panted, shook wildly, whimpered in horror and lingering pain, he pulled her back up, one arm under the bend of her knees, and carried her inside to where Hartia was already opening the door, still coughing and taking in the cold air that was still unfortunately fairly heavy with the acrid smell of smoke.

Inside the Tavern, Bagup still had his shotgun loaded and aimed it at the door while Majic was running forward, talking a mile a minute with tears already on his face, and all Orphen could hear was the echoing ring in his head like the cloche of a belltower. Transporting two bodies at once had always made him vaguely lightheaded, but this was different. He blinked, breathing slow while Majic pulled out a chair from one of the pub tables to settle his clinging bundle in. Half-kneeling by the chair, he unloaded her but still she clung, one shoulder and arm slick red with bright blood, the crawling crimson stain spreading down the embroidered bodice of her dress. A glance in a properly lighted room was all it took to realize that possibly he'd underestimated the severity of his wound. Knelt down as he was, his blood was painting the floor in fat drops, shining like brilliant garnets on the unfinished, nail studded wood panels.

Once he'd pried free of Cleo, deposited her firmly in a chair, Majic was filling another seat, flipping opening a varnish-yellowed medical box on the table top with frantic hands, asking him something with his eyebrows pinched tightly together on his forehead, but his head was still buzzing and blurry. He had to shake his head at him and sit, take a moment to find where his breath had gone. It was Cleo's tear-ragged voice that first wormed past the ringing, and it was her hands unbuckling his mantle from around his throat while Majic was unloading a clinking array of corked glass bottles and gauze scraps onto the table.

"It's my fault," she was whispering, weakly tugging open Orphen's jacket while he waived her back with an unfocused protest. He dragged his arms out of the sleeves, and clenching his teeth against the lancing pain, he pulled his arms up and the blood soaked gray shirt over his head to uncover the slanted, deep ravine carved just below the junction of the clavicle and the shoulder, where the blade had glanced off the bone on its way out. For a simple puncture, the amount of blood running out could only mean she'd clipped a blood vessel with that blade, and it certainly explained the ringing in his head. He coughed and another rush of red rolled down his chest to add to the smeared mess, and Cleo was distracting herself with apologizing foolishly, half choked with her tears, repeating over and over that she was to blame.

"Don't be f…don't…" he stumbled, biting back the expletive that naturally wanted to come out as part of the sentence. He pushed a folded compress on the wound, holding it with his palm while Majic was uncapping what looked like iodine. "It's not so bad, it's just bleeding like a bastard. Didn't even go through the other side."

"_No_…I…" she whispered brokenly, perched on the edge of her chair with a nervous tension obvious in her posture, reaching for his hanging, blood slick hand and gripping it in both of hers, which he allowed briefly. He didn't mention that if she'd been listening while inside that closet, she probably could have recognized his voice and avoided attacking him. This once, he wasn't going to fault her any lack of reason or judgment. He wasn't sure if, under the circumstances, he would have fared much better.

Hartia appeared at the table, spinning a chair and sitting on it backward, his arms folded across the top of the backrest. "Cleo, you have nothing in the world to be sorry for. No one in their right mind would blame you for anything you would do to protect yourself in that situation. Krylancelo's had worse than that little cut."

The tears were back, new hiccupping sobs that she bent and caught in her bloody hands, her willfully built distraction dissipated. She reverted back to her former state for long minutes while Hartia soothed her and Majic worked to stop the bleeding, his attention poorly split between his work and Cleo's shivering, unintelligible mess, and Orphen snatched the compress back from his apprentice and reapplied it himself, pressing with his palm and impatiently taking a chance at closing it with sorcery. "I mend thee, scar of the setting sun."

"Master, the disinfectant…"

"Forget it, it's bled enough."

"It's bleeding too much, that'll never take. You need _stitches_."

"Well, for now it's going to have to," he told him, gesturing to the girl and climbing up from his chair with a fistful of gauze. "Check _her_. She says she's not bit."

"Not…bit?" Majic breathed, looking up at him from his chair with fear-polished eyes. "What's that…what _happened_?"

"The same kind of shit that happened here, just…much fucking worse. I guess they knew the doctor was there…" He shrugged, trying to keep his voice even. "A lot of the sick, dying, the way you talked about. You know. Reduced to animals? They overran the mansion. I can't explain anything else. There's…bodies."

Majic threw a look over at Cleo, then returned his attention to his master, standing as well and dropping his voice lower so Cleo couldn't hear him over herself. "Wuh…what do you mean bodies?"

Jesus. What the hell did he _think_ he meant by bodies? "Bodies, Majic," he said sourly. "Dead. Those crazy biting bastards, it doesn't look like they know anything anymore if they get like that. Definitely not what they're doing. Not even self-preservation. I didn't count, but there's a lot of people chewed up, bled to death. Probably more that got bit and ran."

Struck silent, the boy stared a moment, as though trying to even entertain the possibility of such a thing. He gestured over to his father, keeping watch at the front window, who started over after checking the deadbolt on the door.

"I don't understand," Majic murmured, ready to rattle off more of his pamphlet facts. "You don't see anyone that bad out in public, not normally, much less walking around and part of a mob. That doesn't make any sense, they just don't have that kind of capacity once they're so far gone."

Orphen was staring at the fire. Given the entire evening, first Cleo's news, then the alcohol and the soaring adrenaline and blood loss, everything he'd seen and everything he hadn't mentioned, his composure was weak and it wasn't even midnight yet. With a feeble exhale, he cursed at no one. "Fuck."

"Master?"

Pulling in a deep breath, he raked his cleaner hand through his damp hair, scrubbed at his smoke-stung eyes, then cast a look over his shoulder to where Hartia was speaking lowly to Cleo, suddenly wanting to trade places. He didn't want to bear this news, and he should have been the one consoling her, if only he had any idea of what to say. He didn't. He pushed a palm against one closed eye, his headache was reaching a truly grand proportion. "Mariabella's dead."

Majic seemed to deflate, shrink almost. His mouth opened to speak before his face crumpled slowly, trying to quell his natural reaction and remain in control; strong. When Bagup put a hand on his shoulder, he almost looked as though he meant to shake it off before turning to his father and embracing him. The argumentative attitude from before evaporated, and he made a wet sound before finally turning back, wiping his face with the sleeve of his sweater. "_How?" _

"Like I said already." As though he wanted to describe it or something.

Bagup tightened his arm around his boy before speaking, gave him a stern, ham-fisted pat across his shoulder blades. "You're sure about all this? You saw them getting bit?"

Another rising wave of dizziness sat him down on a pull-out bar stool, and he leaned on the counter, closing his eyes. "More of the already bitten," he corrected churlishly, "But yeah, I saw them. Some, anyway. Seemed to have no clue the place was burning down. No damn idea how many there might have been to do that much…"

"How could they've made it there with everyone else without tearing into one of the crowd? Or even each other?" The old man wondered aloud, checking the bandages on his arm. "I've seen how quickly they go from quiet to bloody ballistic. But even still, I didn't get myself bit until I grabbed the guy to toss him out."

"Maybe it was in kind of self-defense?" Majic's voice shook when he said it, looking almost hopefully at Orphen only to receive a grim shake of the head at the idea, painting a portrait of the gruesome scene with just how certain he was that none of this had been done in self-defense. Far from it. Those people had been running for their lives. Like Mariabella with the skeleton key. She'd locked Cleo in the music cupboard to protect her, maybe in the panicked, desperate last moments of her life. Maybe at her own expense.

"We really ought to talk to the Doc, then, if we can. Don't you think, Maj?"

"He should've been there, it was his son's party as much as it was Cleo's…" Majic didn't seem to skirt the topic now as he had before.

"Well, nobody's there now," Orphen found himself almost spitting that sentence out with an extraordinary hostility that was probably more than a little misplaced. It wasn't just the doctor himself or his three-thousand-socket treatment or who Cleo was or more likely was not marrying. It was how the Farrior family had allegedly come to bring relief and brought only more misery upon those who had welcomed them and even, in his case, those who hadn't. Now most of the Everlastings were dead, if Cleo's reaction to his question about her mother had indicated what he suspected it did, along with maybe half the city and just about all of that was burning. Amazing how things had decided to unravel while he'd been away but completely fall to pieces the moment he returned. It was a curse. The more difficult things in life always seemed to find their way across his path.

"I suspect they'd go to the clinic if they'd had to run."

"Clinic? Thought it burned _down_?"

Majic nodded, seeming almost annoyed that he had to explain. As though it was his fault he'd specially chosen these particular difficult months to be elsewhere. Like babysitting everybody's little halcyon lives was his goddamn job and he'd been slacking.

"It did. After it burned, Dr. Farrior set up a temporary treatment clinic over on East Birch, you know, until there was a longterm solution."

"Sure," he sneered through a lingering cough from the smoke, his anger swelling up like an aggravated sore. Everyone he knew was talking about this _doctor_ like he was just short of being canonized and the only result of his work he'd seen so far, aside from Bagup's condition, was a rapidly worsening riot in normally peaceful streets and gruesome death, the effective ruining of lives. "And what makes you think all of those people at the mansion didn't come from there? Sounds like a good collective of the infected that could come together and be pissed off that they weren't getting better for however much they were paying."

Majic shrugged, sitting down beside him with his eyes still wet and red from the bombshell he'd dropped a few minutes before. "I guess that's possible."

"You guess it is, huh?"

"Nuh…well, of course it is, but…"

"But what? Who gives a shit what happened to him, we're got ourselves to worry about right now, don't we?" With his head propped on his hand, Orphen glanced over to where Hartia was on his haunches, carefully unlacing Cleo's heeled boot with her skirt heaped up on her lap like meringue frosting. "Wouldn't do any good right now, anyhow."

With interest, he watched Cleo flinch when the boot slid off, her ankle swollen and livid purple even though the sheer stocking. But as far as he could see, she wasn't nursing any open wounds. The blood on her clothes seemed to be mostly his own. But her face, she didn't look any way he was accustomed to seeing her. Not even upset. Just…

"Master? Did you hear me?"

Lightheaded again, leaning ever heavier on his hand on the bar counter, he turned his eyes back to the boy with wavering focus. "Sorry?"

With an exhausted twist of his mouth, Majic was reaching at him with a bar towel. "You're bleeding again. Maybe you should lie down."

"Son of a bitch." He looked down at his wound and shook his head, wiping his face and hands before pushing it tight against the wound, sopping up the new blood ineffectually. It really did need stitches, a lot of them. "We need to talk about what we're going to do. We're not safe here, we're not staying. For that matter, neither should your Dad."

Bagup, behind the bar, was pouring himself the drink his son had earlier cheated him out of. He shook his head. "I ain't leaving this place to those vultures. They can burn it down over my dead body."

"They might do just that," he told him.

"That may be, son. But it's damn sure to happen if I leave. Ain't the first time there's been strife in Totokanta, you gotta know when to push back." He took a swallow of his whiskey, glanced down into the glass with a bleak smile under his mustache. "This is where me and Iris settled on. She's buried here. I will be too."

Orphen dropped his forehead to the countertop, closing his eyes and breathing slow, breath condensing wet on the polished wood under his mouth. His brain was soup. Foaming, useless glop with everything stirred up in it, churning, like liquid in a boiling pot. He'd never pretended to understand people in the first place. "That's a hell of a sacrifice, old man."

Bagup gave a sad-sounding chuckle, finishing off his tumbler and reaching to fill it again. "That's not how I see it."

While Majic protested fervently, Orphen opened his eyes to the dark, too-close reflection of himself in the wood and turned his head. Majic didn't understand, but, in a kind of pathetic shock, he did. Love, that never-thinning poison, it stripped that kind of free will away. Even in his spinning, furious, over-boiled mind, he knew the old man was right, at least inasmuch as he wouldn't be swayed from his stance. He didn't even see it as a possibility.

Because it's only sacrifice if you have a choice. All one had to do was look at the insane things he'd already done tonight to know that. At what Mariabella had done, perhaps, in her last moments. At the lengths he had once gone to save Azalie. There was no choice to be had. In a time of strife, love renders the illusion of options utterly obsolete.

With his head turned, still holding the compress on his shoulder, he could see Cleo at the little tavern table in her stocking feet, wiping off her bloody hands with a clean towel, and he watched her with a freight train of some bitter, bizarre melancholy plowing over him. He hadn't noticed until now. With everything else, the chaos and absolute mind-wringing horror, there were a lot of things to distract him from it. But now, idiotically, it was the only thing he could even see.

With her hands clawed up, rubbing the bloody towel held between them with that dazed, desolate stare on her face, there was nothing to do but notice it: the icy flash of a diamond ring on her finger. And as arbitrary as it was, really, in the grand scheme of everything, he couldn't take his eyes off it. Even when she glanced up, like she could feel his eyes on her, he couldn't look away the way he normally would. Couldn't do anything he normally would, not even look apathetic. Looking in her eyes, the world felt cold, dead and airless around him, not just because of her ashen complexion, the misery in her expression or the way she curled her hands together like a closing flower, obscuring the ring from view. It was because every waking second he'd spent with her for the past few years, he'd spent carefully engineering an artifice of indifference, only to sit dumbly and let her watch it crack.

Or maybe, he'd just lost too much blood.

ooo…ooo…ooo

To be continued…


	6. The Noble Departed

**VI: The Noble Departed**

"No, what _I'd_ like to know is where the fuck these people went after the fucking house was burning the fuck down."

"Easy. You want her to hear you talking like that?"

"She's fucking used to me talking like that. _Jesus_, Hartia, watch it."

With the lamp wick turned up so high, the glass chimney was already frosted black inside with a climbing film of soot. Hartia half-squinted in the bright amber light, pinching the skin between his scrubbed-clean fingers. He hooked the needle through the angry, red edges of the wound and pulled the waxy thread taut, pressing out more blood.

"Uh, swab," he instructed, and Cleo daubed the gathering blood away with a bandage scrap from the medicine kit, muslin soaked in grain-alcohol from the bar. She kept her eyes on the wound with a fixed kind of determination, pushing herself to do anything but sit at the table and stare at the floor. If Orphen knew her at all, and sometimes he liked to think he did, she was purposefully building herself a distraction. She hated being thought of as useless. He'd heard different versions of that protest leave her mouth a hundred times, so when she'd shown up somewhere around the fifth or sixth suture with a cloth, what with all of Hartia's complaining that all the bleeding was making it impossible to see, he hadn't protested her involvement as much as he felt he should under the circumstances. At least it had gotten her up from the table where she'd been collapsed, unmoving and silent since they'd come in, incapable of coherent speech much less in possession of the answers to anyone's questions.

What's funny was, well maybe not funny, like ha-ha funny, but ironic, was that so often in the past he'd just wanted her to shut her mouth and now, while she sat there silently, there was a growing desire just to hear her say anything at all. But the continuing pain was doing a lot of his talking for him, which hadn't included any of those thoughts.

"Fuck," he breathed. The little curved needle pulled shut another millimeter of his cut flesh. Something about pain on top of other pain. It rarely meshed into a single sensation. Each component: his pulsating head, the rift sliced into his shoulder, each piercing of his flesh with that tiny needle and the thread dragging through, then the searing sting of the alcohol in the wound; they each had their own life, each an independent and functioning piece of a conglomerated monster. He'd refused the hit of opium tincture beforehand and might have been regretting it just a little. Who knew why he'd said no. Truthfully, any kind of opium put him down for the count, and being out of commission wasn't an option yet. Or maybe the pain was his own kind of distraction. He'd been accused of being a sick person more than once in his life but it was true. The pain was enough that he hadn't thought much about what they were facing, what had really happened to Mariabella and most of all, he hadn't given much thought to how he really felt about any of it.

He'd have to sort it out later. Right now, feeling any particular way about it was a luxury he didn't have energy or time for.

With careful, measured pressure but a kind of tense rigidity, a small hand blotted the black stitched seam tracking over his shoulder after another few stitches. The fingers were cold. They were wearing a diamond. He didn't look at them. Another careful suture stole his attention back, and Hartia said something that he only heard three-quarters of over the internal echo of his swallowed howl.

"Say again?"

"I said, despite your objections, I bet you wouldn't mind the doctor being here right about now to take over for me." He tugged another loop shut, and Cleo stiffly dabbed up the mess. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was recalling that something Cleo couldn't stand almost more than feeling useless and burdensome was the sight of blood. It seemed she particularly hated the sight of his, for one reason or another, yet here she was, cleaning it up while she was covered with it.

"Right now, I am cataloging methods of your impending torture in my reptilian brain. There's no room for anything else."

"My point exactly."

"You don't make to make such goddamn small stitches either, asshole."

"It's probably better that I do if your original mending invocation is any marker of how long this might take to heal on its own."

"Let's leave my invocation out of this. It's not going to have to," he reclined his head on the sofa's backrest, closed his eyes woozily. "This would hardly be an appropriate treatment if it was. Why don't you just stop talking and get it over with?"

"If that's what you want." Pulled up close in his chair, Hartia stabbed through a few more times and drew the waxy string taut, his face tight with intense concentration the whole time. "Still," he said lightly, after a few moments, "I just can't understand what these people are thinking. Half the city's out there burning. What does it accomplish?"

Orphen's gave a disgusted grimace, a particularly biting tug of the thread made his voice come out rough. "A feeling of control, I guess."

Focused intently, Hartia just shook his head a fraction from side to side. The silence off to his left gave a ragged exhale, fighting a wave of emotion. It was all he could do not to turn toward the sound.

"Master?" His senses were definitely off. He hadn't even heard Majic's heavy footed cow-walk, and almost jumped at the unexpected sound of his voice. He was already a bit on the edgy side.

"Yeah."

Hesitation followed, then quietly, he replied, conspicuously apprehensive about his news. "There's some men outside."

"Of course there is." The quiet figure to his left seemed to straighten a little, the rustle of the beads and stiff underskirts distracted him a moment before he continued. "Think it can wait until I'm not bleeding to death?"

"I don't know. They're…asking for you."

That opened his eyes. The bright image of his apprentice leaning apprehensively over him wavered slightly like a reflection in water, which wasn't a great sign where his health was concerned. "Who, exactly, are they asking for?"

It seemed like a fair question. The answer wasn't exactly what he was hoping to hear: Majic stumbling with a word he knew he didn't want to hear out of anybody's mouth, much less his apprentice's. "K…Kryl…"

He focused on the kid's anxious face, Majic's eyes were inevitably drawn to Hartia's messy project before coming back up, waiting for instructions while Orphen inhaled slowly, thinking. "You seen them before?"

Majic shook his head in slow motion, almost nervously, which really could mean anything. Before he could ask anything else, he volunteered a helpful observation, "They look unhappy."

Well, excellent. And maybe, if he went outside, a meteor would fall out of the sky and crush him. That was the kind of day it had been, after all, at least since he'd gotten into town. It had been fairly uneventful in the morning, waking up in the camp in Bazilkok. Stupidly, he'd almost been looking forward to today.

If only he'd known what he'd really had to look forward to.

Lightheaded, Orphen glanced down the mess of his own torso at Hartia, who was looking up at Majic with the same expression he would probably be making if he'd had the energy. A kind of wary, frozen disbelief. He turned that look on him. "The _hell_?"

"You almost finished there?"

"Eh…about ten more would get it shut..." Hartia didn't quite look certain, looking thin and sallow in his undershirt, wrist deep in sticky red.

"Right, so…come on."

"No. _No_. You're not going out there. I don't know for sure how much blood you've lost here, might be a couple pints. You didn't have enough power to get that healing charm to work for more than five minutes before it pissed out, much less to go out there and get into trouble. Look at you, you wouldn't make it to the door."

"Well, then you go out there and tell them I can't come outside and play, yeah?"

"You think I won't."

He watched Hartia standing up, then breezed out a kind of dizzy laugh. "No, you sure look like you're about to, but I'd rethink it. You're a shitty liar."

"Well, then I guess I'll have to tell them the truth that you're in here bleeding and pale like a little bitch." With one corner of his mouth tightened up in an annoyed scowl while he slid past him, toweling his hands and pausing by Cleo with a gentle nudge on her arm with the clean part of his wrist. "Maybe you could hold that thing shut for me a minute?"

There was a slight delay before she nodded vaguely, her eyes still faraway and gleaming wet, focused on the stitched line before she pressed the blood spotted cloth to it with her palm flat, her cold fingers curled over onto his back while Orphen craned his head around after Hartia and called after him. "Ah ha HA. _Funny_."

After a moment, he got to hear that voice he'd been yearning for, only for it to be so hushed and abraded he could barely recognize it. "You…do look pale."

"Yeah, well," he said, glancing over, tamping down another cough. "Don't worry about it."

It should have been like clockwork. She should have glared, told him that she _wasn't_ worried about it in the most blasé, superior tone she could muster up. Instead a crease appeared on her forehead, her lips tightened against themselves a moment before everything smoothed back out. And she said nothing, until tearfully, she gushed another apology. "I'm so sorry."

He shook his head, rocked it back and forth just slightly on the backrest of the small, worn loveseat. "I already said, don't be."

"I can't," she said, so soft he had to strain to hear. "You…you came to help me. And I…God. I. I would never have…"

"I know that, cut it out."

"You went into a burning building," she rasped, her eyes still trained hard on the still-bleeding rent she'd left in him in her stricken fear, like a cornered animal lashing out on survival instinct. "You didn't have to, but you went into a burning building to help me and this is what I do to you."

"Stop. It's fine. _I'm_ fine. Don't work yourself up any more about it; we have more important things to be concerned about." He shifted on the worn cushions, forgetting a moment that moving any muscle seemed to make the wound pulsate with new, gut-twisting pain. "Not the least of which being what we're going to do. I don't know if you've given it much thought, you know, if you want to wait for the authorities…file a report. Anything like that. It might take a few days around here…honestly, I'm not sure it's safe to stay."

"I would have burned to death." She hadn't heard a word. Instead of hysterical, her voice had taken on an empty, sepulchral quality that he didn't like at all. He started to reply, but she looked up from the wound, her eyes on his, and he forgot what he was going to say next.

"If you hadn't come," she whispered, tears shredding her tone to a wavering mess. "I would have burned in there."

Whatever was the right thing to say, he had no idea. He'd lost a lot of blood in the past hour and his judgment wasn't stellar, but then, it never had been when it came to the right things to say, much less the right things to say to Cleo. He couldn't bring up Mariabella. Not even express sympathy, not with that tired anguish still written on her face. But he had to say something. "Wish I'd known to come sooner…"

She had a strange reaction to it, and immediately he wished he hadn't said anything after all. It made her face pinch again, all the muscles in it tightened for a moment while she bowed forward with her bare shoulders going round while her head dropped, overcome again with her half-swallowed tears.

"But you're…not hurt. Right?" He dropped his voice a little, leaning further forward, enough to see her face. "Right?"

Sniffing, she nodded. Her free hand lifted up, catching soft and cold against his cheek. He was wondering what to think about that when she inclined toward him, and touched her lips against his the way he'd thought of doing maybe a thousand times before but never had.

It was just for a second, if that. Just a moment's gentle pull of damp suction against his bottom lip before she was someplace else, her forehead dropped down on the knuckles of her own hand, the one pushing the compress on the shoulder she'd butchered and breathing her wet, weeping breath down his chest with her whisper chasing up his neck. "Thank you."

And even though it was so innocent, an earnest expression of gratitude when normally it would take a steam train to drag a begrudging thank-you out of her, he didn't even think about that. The blood that was left in his veins felt briefly like champagne, fizzing and bottled up and just for that second, the blackest shadow in his brain shifted knowingly, flexed its muscles and a kind of embarrassment rose up at the fleeting but undeniably carnal effect that had rolled through like a storm front.

No doubt, it wasn't the right thing to feel under the circumstances. Not even remotely, but really, it wasn't a surprise that he didn't know how to act.

Not around anyone who'd just lost everything, much less Cleo. For the first time since knowing her, all he wanted was not to upset her, and opening his mouth to speak was an unexpectedly enormous source of anxiety as virtually every damn second he'd spent around her had been practice in the innumerable ways he could manage to rattle her cage. So instead of speaking, he reached for the limp hand she had dropped her lap, in hopes that could communicate the kind of human empathy that he never could seem to with his useless tongue. Regularly his interactions with her bordered on muted hostility, just out of a kind of prolonged self-preservation strategy; it wasn't easy to just switch it off with that defense mechanism already screaming into the red zone.

If she had anything to say about it, he didn't find out. Hearing Hartia's footsteps shortly afterward drew her attention again and she straightened up, wiping her raw eyes with the back of her hand and watching a thin, freckled arm thrust a clipboard in Orphen's face. "Sign this," he told him.

"What is it, a waiver of injury?" He let out a long, anxious breath that had really very little to do with the visitors, and squinted at the manila slip a moment before Hartia breezed a tired laugh.

"The kid's paranoid, he ran off they second they asked for you. Guess you can't blame him. It's just the telegram service."

"_Telegram_. Fuck me." He plucked the pen off the clip and squinted at the delivery notice with aggravated interest. "Since when does Stephanie send things to _that_ name?"

"Since you can't send a telegram to someone with no surname, I'd guess. Sign it and they can get the hell out of here."

With a responding scowl, Orphen resentfully scribbled on the line with the fountain pen and shoved the board back at Hartia, who disappeared to the front again while Cleo glanced briefly under the compress with her dreary, downcast eyes and commented almost quiet enough that he didn't hear. "You're left handed."

"Yeah?"

"…never noticed before."

Awkwardly, he had an urge to laugh at that. His natural reaction had been to remind her that she'd likely never had reason to notice such a thing, until he'd had to let go of her hand to sign a receipt. Usually she noticed things only as they applied to her, at her convenience, or so it seemed to him. But he didn't say anything, just watched her warily while she pulled her gaze back up to his face as though it took every muscle in her body to do it.

"Orphen…"

Hartia came back around the corner from the entrance, dropping a thin envelope in his lap and going about swabbing his hands again with the bottle of grain alcohol that waited on the little end table with the hurricane lamp. With a tug of an index finger, the envelope tore open and inside on the parchment, after the station information for Totokanta Harbor South, a single line was typed out. For a long minute, he just stared at it before reading it through again, and again. Afterward, he handed it silently over to Hartia, who did the same with an expression almost bereft of any readable human emotion, then leaned his bare elbows on his knees with the same blank look, craning his copper head up and staring hard at the flame turned up high in the lamp's smutty glass flue. He stared until his pupils had contracted to pinholes, until his squinting against the brightness looked almost like someone looking into the sun. Then he turned to Orphen, who gave a tense shake of his head.

Majic had reappeared, casting his apprehensive gaze at the three of them with a growing din of unrest rattling silent in the air around him like a pair of rustling, invisible wings.

"What does it say?"

It wasn't Majic who voiced the question. Instead, Cleo was leaning forward, her eyes less soft-focus than they had been while they eyed the drooping telegram slip in Hartia's hand. Tentatively, she reached her hand out in an asking gesture, and with only a half-glance at Orphen, as though expecting a permissive nod, extended the paper to the girl, and she flattened it on her lap, the parchment lit bright in the lamplight with its scant line of text:

_For n__one among the living shall disturb the long __repose __of the noble departed, for they shall breathe time and swallow the night. _

She immediately looked up with the same uncertain worry on her face, then turned it on Orphen, as it seemed everybody was wont to do.

"It's rune translation," he said. "We were working on it this morning before I left. It had an unusual set, it didn't translate well...and I didn't have time to…" He puffed out a convulsive, quick exhale that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so on edge. Instead, he coughed again, still plagued by the sting of the smoke hanging in the air and soaked into his lungs. "She said she'd send it to me if she worked it out. It's from the fresco over the rectory antechamber, the one they opened today…"

Her lips were shaking. She really should have been resting, lying down, maybe with a sedative. Instead here she was pushing a compress on his half-sewn up wound that Hartia still hadn't just tried his sorcerous hand at healing, trembling in the cold in her bloody dress without a blanket or even a shawl. "What…what does…"

"That's from over the rectory? Why…" Hartia rubbed a hand over his face. "…why would that be in a church? What's that even mean?"

"I don't know, it's _Nornir_. Read a scripture sometime, they're all kind of…you know. Cryptic. You going to finish this fucking thing or not?"

"Easy. It just seems weird is all. And I _have_ read…"

"Can we talk about it later? If you don't mind?"

Hartia was scooting his chair back up, retrieving the needle from where it hung and resuming work a little more quickly than Orphen might have been prepared. He winced at the first stitch, at the needle biting deep in his flesh, swallowing a curse and leaning his head back against a wave of dizzy nausea. He was working fast, working to finish, not giving him the time to recuperate between sutures the way he had before. After another several tortuous tugs of thread sliding through skin and severed intercostal muscle, as though he'd taken the previously offered opiate, the pain shrank suddenly back like an ebbing tide. Hartia was swiping his grain-alcohol soaked cloth across the knotted black line sewn crookedly underlining his right collarbone, and then, without further warning, with his palm flat on the cloth, incanted irritably, "Mend thy flesh."

A flash of tingling heat, a spike of stomach cramping agony with the flesh beginning to knit and pull together all at once and he was breathless, staring at the ceiling with a rapid onset fever and sweat already in his hair despite the cold, unsure how long he'd been slumped there in a burning, dizzy shock. Sometime during his shutdown, under the edge of her spread out skirts, Cleo's frigid hand had closed around his.

By the fire, Majic and Hartia were purposing plans to head north, to get out of Totokanta and return to Alenhaten as had been the original arrangement, at the very least to regroup and make some decisions. Whatever the hell they were going to be, he had no idea, absolutely no clue what to do next. Orphen felt too odd and numb to feel any particular way but exhausted. In a way, how he felt was the same way Cleo looked, anxious and fatigued while she was looking at him as though she thought he might drop dead any second. From the way he felt, she wasn't actually too far off. He wasn't even certain he could stand up, much less ignite even a scrap of paper with the right words and focus.

How could they go anywhere like this? And how could they really leave everything that was happening here behind them?

The telegram was still flattened on Cleo's lap, the line of ink lit up in the high wicked lamplight. The rune translation. Hartia didn't think it belonged in a temple.

He'd read things like that before from the Nornir, their cryptic talk was all over volumes of collected writings, the Book of Granular Light, the Book of Deep Rivers. In catacombs and aqueducts. In tombs. But…not in temples. At the ruined fane at Baltander's Island, the walls had been clean of any writings. Azalie had said at the time that the oldest dragon families had subscribed to the belief that it was blasphemy to speak within earshot of the Gods, that including the written word. Runic displays were not seen in chapels. And there was no way that Stephanie hadn't known that to start with.

Why had she been referring to the ruins as temple grounds? The more he thought of it now, the more strange it was seeming. But none of it had occurred to him until now. While he'd been down there in the dark, poring over bas reliefs of the vaguely human figures of the Nornir, winged and blindfolded in some kind of symbol, transcribing entire walls of text for later translation, arguing about differences in the degraded rune sets, it hadn't struck him once that if the place was what Stephanie had said, none of it should be there.

What had the boy said? The boy he'd pinned to the floor, Levi? Something about the dig in Bazilkok. He couldn't remember what, he'd laughed at the time, even though a few minutes later he'd have liked to reach in and rip out the kid's tongue at its root and watch him struggle against the rising tide of his own blood. The kid knew something had gone on at the Everlasting Manor. He'd known what they were going there to do. He'd probably even known who they were.

He'd already decided back in the mansion that he was going to find who was responsible for what had happened there. And he was going to put them in the ground.

There was that voice in his head again, it sounded like Hideland, last he'd seen him a few years before: _Krylancelo, you would never kill anyone. You never could kill anyone. _

Well, Orphen could. And had. And would again, it was just a matter of time. He'd resisted it, denied it, told Val Karen that he'd never become the same kind of man he was, only to fall into step with him out of necessity. The ugly world had pulled that monster out of him, and he'd never be able to go back. He could never be Krylancelo again. Not now. Not anymore. It had become clear long ago now that he'd never touch anything with truly clean hands.

But that was probably as it should be. But even still, with a slow twist, he pulled his hand out of Cleo's. Maybe if he hadn't spent so much time in the inn room, staring at the fire and _not _being upset, he could have had the chance to see what was happening. Maybe if he would have just listened to his intuition that had told him to retrieve her first before coming to the Lodge, not let her persuade him that she could meet them later…maybe things would have been different. At least for her. She had no real reason to thank him.

That she might know the kind of black things creeping around in his brain, that he fully intended on murdering whatever twisted, self-righteous fool had instigated the riot against the Everlasting house; these weren't things she needed to know about him. She needed to know that even less than she needed to know what he'd felt when she'd pressed her mouth against his. Both could be explained easily, traced back to the same crushing shameful unpleasant truth: He was a terrible person.

It wasn't as though she hadn't suspected this on her own probably. But in her own way, Cleo, she was so innocent. Naïve. The same could be said for Majic. Even Hartia, really. They didn't know the half of what it meant to be a horrible human being, likely couldn't even conjure up in their heads the degree of the transgressions on his karma debt. There was a time when he couldn't have either, never even imagined himself capable until he'd stepped over that line, whenever it had been exactly. He had a few theories in that area. There were so many he'd sent to that long sleep of the noble departed, the way that the rune translation said it made it sound different than what it really was. It made death sound like a reward, the way it would on a tomb.

But really. If only murder, even impersonal paid murder, had been the worst misdeed he could confess to. It wasn't.

Someone like him oughtn't to have his hands anywhere near her, even to comfort her. So even though she cast him her sad glance, he withdrew from her hold. If he were deserving of the things he wanted in life, he would have happily continued to indulge in her kind concern and gratitude—but as he'd always known, he wasn't.


	7. Lacrimosa

**VII**: **Lacrimosa**

The tears had returned while mounting the Bedouin Gray gelding called Seraphino. He was just one of the horses Hartia and Majic had freed from the Everlasting stable complex, and they'd had their choice of dozens. She'd pictured them running through the haylockers, throwing open doors and cranking up deadbolts, letting the horses run. Which had ended up in bridles to aid in their own escape north to Alenhaten, it was completely chance.

But they'd taken Seraphino, Mariabella's preferred mount since he'd been brought in about four summers past. Cleo had never ridden him, not even once.

Now they were taking him and running. Fleeing the city, leaving everything else behind to burn.

She'd fought off sobbing while she'd changed clothes, while she'd wrenched herself out of the whalebone corset when she should have asked for help, and destroyed it in the process. Not that it mattered. She'd reminded herself of that repeatedly while she'd jerked open the little pack she'd left at the Inn weeks before, when she'd been planning on running on her own, when she'd been over trying to convince Majic to come with her just for familiarity's sake, or at least so she'd said. But Bagup was bitten, and never one to take any chances alone, she'd had to go home. She'd had to ask Ambrose for a favor. She'd had to look into that smug face after she'd snapped in front of his family and her mother and spat that she'd become Lady Farrior over her dead body.

Over _her_ dead body. Not Majic's father's.

As much as she'd wanted to run…as much as she'd desperately _wanted to run_…she couldn't let Bagup die when she could do something about it, something she would wager no one else could. She couldn't see Majic suffer through the loss of his father when she knew so acutely the pain of it. When she was still gripped with it herself, even almost five years after they'd buried hers.

If only Daddy was still around. He wouldn't have ever let any of this happen, any of it. He would have protected her mother. And Mariabella wouldn't be dead because of _her_.

In her sweater and riding boots, standing in the fog and gathering snow, all she could do was throw her arms around the muscular arch of Seraphino's warm neck and cry. She'd been holding on to the rushing flood inside her like a levee, holding it back because crying and moaning wasn't going to help her, wasn't going to do anything for anybody at all. That much was obvious while she was shaking at the table, swallowing tears and listening to Orphen catch his breath between stitches while Hartia was trying to sew up the marvelous hole she'd cut in him for bothering to save her worthless life.

Familiarity's sake. That's the line she'd fed Majic, trying to cajole him into running with her those weeks past. The truth was less friendly. The truth was that she knew she couldn't take care of herself in the way she'd need to, especially since Reiki had gotten far too big for keeping and she'd had to turn him loose months before. Yes, if she'd run on her own, she'd end up mugged, starved, raped and murdered for her coinpurse. Fencing had its merits as a sport but was generally useless as a practical application of fighting against men who weren't constrained by the rules of engagement of a five-touch bout, of hit restrictions in épée versus sabre. It was a romantic thought, very much the ambition of a strong literary heroine, but if travelling with her two male companions for the better part of the last few years had taught her anything, it was that the world was in no way anything like it was illustrated by her mother, by Our Lady of Perpetual Grace Girl's Academy in Meverlenst, by the Institute Gauloise finishing school she'd been virtually abandoned at for an entire holiday break the winter before meeting Orphen.

There was no place an aristocratic girl was sent to be schooled on what the world was like outside of those gilt and marble walls. Even her instructors, as she'd once thought back on them, it was hard to even consider that they knew anything about what things were like in the cold, dark corners of the city streets, where the streetlights don't touch and the carriage lines won't run. She'd begun to suspect it on her own months before she'd laid eyes on Orphen, but when she had, God knew what she'd been thinking in her determination to follow him into those places everything she'd ever been told assured her she ought to never go.

All she'd known was that in the sorcerer's dark, restless eyes, she could see the shadows with which she'd become so infatuated. She could see the darkness of streets and violence, a depth of ugly, unsavory knowledge of a world she'd been increasingly obsessed with cutting off a tiny piece of for her to keep, that she could keep inside her and peek at after her Mother had her way and nailed her into her arranged-marriage-coffin and she spent her life smiling blandly at debut parties and on opera balconies, doing her shitty needlepoint and raising fat babies until she was fading and elderly, wrinkled, frail and weighed down heavy in diamonds and bitterness. A life in a beautiful, bland, gilded coma.

And no, it didn't make sense and if she was smart at all, had any kind of brain in her head, she should have been scared to death of someone like him. She wouldn't have pursued him like an obsessive collector, but she'd never been anything resembling practical in her whole life. What had happened, as perhaps it's inevitable for a girl, was that instead of the peek at the real world she'd wanted a piece of, it had instead become Orphen she'd wanted. Orphen with his frigid sneering disdain, so armored within his sharp-tongued anger, she'd wanted to crack him open like a clam and look inside; to understand him, feel him, to listen to his heart beating. And probably that was crazy, just as she wasn't altogether certain he wasn't exactly sane himself, none of that repelled her. What likely didn't hurt was that he was startlingly beautiful for a man, something of which he seemed wholly and infuriatingly unaware. With his unruly shock of thick black hair, the kind that would barely comb down properly even if he tried; his magnetic, rust-colored eyes ringed with far more eyelashes than a man would ever require in her opinion. Sinewy, bronze-skinned and muscular with his battle-ravaged clothes and a voice that ripped through the air when he spoke, lush and low but somehow cutting, his long vowels tilted with a vague northern accent; really it was the way everybody who came from the Tower sounded, except not. Every time he turned that contemptuous stare on her she'd catch fire and forget her name and how to breathe, thrumming and vibrant with a brand new heartbeat.

But the problem had been that, in her own way, this was the very thing Mariabella had seen. When they'd met him, when he'd shown up out of the sunlit, no-big-deal summer day in Totokanta, outside her own house that was more like a place she visited between schools, Mariabella had been ready to run away after him in a way she would have never expected from her big sister. Mariabella who would marry Earl Westerlake when she was of age. Who had never voiced a single protest against it. Who had never said a word that sounded for a second that she would do anything but what was expected, or that she should have any reason to question it.

Cleo had steered her away from that decision. A sorcerer? A rogue, of all things! She'd reminded her of her duties, her position in society and the household, sweet and straightforward, the voice of aristocratic reason. She'd manipulated her the same way their mother had always done. And then she'd gone herself. Mariabella, though she was plainly wounded by it at the time, had held her tongue on the subject for months, and hadn't let her have it until long after she'd returned home with the brand new predicament of being desperately in love with someone who no one in the world, much less her world, had any right or reason for being in love with.

A sorcerer. A rogue. Of all things.

She'd held it in until that very morning, standing behind her and carefully pinning up her hair for the engagement gala while Cleo sulked, fighting tears, and Mariabella said she knew why more than ever her sister wanted nothing to do with a high bred husband and a life of numbingly boring, insipid wealth. Because of _him_.

Patiently parting, spritzing her hair and coiling it around her knuckles, reaching for each shining pin with her long, pianist fingers, Mariabella had fed her the same words Cleo had the first day she'd followed Orphen and Majic out into the shadows of the world and left Mariabella safely behind. She'd reminded her of her duties, her position in society and in the Everlasting house. Of what their mother wanted for her. Then, with a tangible resentment unsuited to her, she'd asked Cleo how empty it all sounded. She'd mournfully chided herself for listening to those words out of her sister's mouth, words spoken to turn her away from the first thing she'd ever wanted enough to pursue it beyond the judgment her years of blueblood brainwashing had burned into her, only to watch her run after it, after _him_ the moment she'd once more accepted her place. She'd told her that there was no way out for either of them.

And no, it wasn't fair but it was the truth.

It was only hours later Cleo was screaming, sinking the point of a kitchen knife into a wild rioter, burying the blade between the man's scapulae until he let go of her sister, into whom he had already sunk his tobacco yellowed teeth. It had happened so fast, all in one breath, when he'd swung around toward her, diving, his eyes glassy and dead as those of cooked meat on a spit, and Mariabella had sprung forward, her face white and mouth open, launching her back with both arms extended and fingers spread wide where they'd caught her bare shoulders. She'd reached behind Cleo's back to open the closet and unceremoniously shoved her in without a word, without apology, and slammed the door in her face before she'd even breathed back in after her first gasp. The sound of the key turning in the lock finished before she was shaking the knob from the inside, yelling for release, slapping the wood in front of her face with the flat of her palm, the one that wasn't gripping the kitchen knife. It was a hard slam on the wooden door on the other side that shut her up, made her choke back her own voice to hear the sound of Mariabella's screaming turning incoherent, a desperate animal sound, turning wet and gurgling, gasping. And then silence.

And the silence, it was so much worse. It was louder than anything she'd ever heard. It was still echoing in her ears now.

She'd called to her, _called to her_ through the door through tears and building hysteria. She'd called for what felt like hours, _hours_ until she'd curled in the tight corner of the closet, giving into her desire to tremble and sob, and if she'd fallen asleep it might have accounted for how the next thing she was aware of was the sound of the key rattling in the lock again, and she'd imagined the man with the dead meat eyes and lunged when the door opened.

And it was Orphen. Orphen with his beautiful contempt and incubus voice, who Mariabella had wanted to follow to the margins of the seas as much as Cleo had. He was everything about the world she'd never been supposed to see, and he had come to save her, to free her from the dark prison she'd been shut in and she'd stabbed him the first place she could reach to thank him for it.

He'd said it was fine, but it wasn't. It wasn't fine at all. Not for her. And from the look she'd seen on his face, not for him either.

Nothing was fine. It would never be fine. Outside the opened closet door, Mariabella was dead. Everyone was dead. The room was hazy with smoke, and her brain shut off. She remembered screaming. _Screaming_. She shuddered and howled until the numbness set in, a kind of frost that grew over her. It let her function long past the point where human sensitivity would have shut her systems down, when it hurt too much to breathe.

But now she was crying again with the ice melted off of her throbbing mind by a simple reminder, a tiny familiarity that brought down the crushing hammer of memory. It had her choking on guttering sobs despite that it would do her no good, to say nothing of everyone else. Her breath pluming around her in the cold, fractured moonlight, arms held around the horse's neck, she found a limited comfort in the warmth, the familiar smell of rawhide and alfalfa.

The hands that fell on her back, they were too halting and timid to be anybody but Majic. When he spoke it was closer to a whisper, the way somebody might speak in a room where others were asleep. "Cleo…" Instead of continuing, he draped an open cloak around her shoulders. She freed the increasingly restless gelding and embraced Majic instead who, unlike Seraphino, returned the gesture.

"Cleo, I'm so sorry," he finally choked, sounding as though he was ready to cry himself. "I'm so _sorry_."

Strangely, the more he apologized, the more she couldn't stop her own weeping. It was a small wonder she was still capable of producing the streaming hot tears that wet her face, that she hadn't cried herself dry yet. They rolled down her neck and cooled before they reached the neckline of her sweater, stiffening cold and tacky on her throat.

"You're not helping things, Majic." Orphen's voice behind them made her heart catch with awkward fear. From the sound of it, he was finishing up tacking the horse with his one fully-functioning arm, his right limited in movement from Hartia's efficient triangle of gauze. It was lucky he was left handed. She wasn't sure how she'd never noticed. Now she couldn't recall just how she _had_ noticed.

"Get her up there with you," he was telling Majic, "Seeing as we've only got the four, and your old man's coming with us if I have to drag him out."

And with her ear so close to Majic's neck, his voice sounded louder and more solid than it seemed she'd ever heard it, but it said the same sorts of things it usually would. "I'm not that strong a rider, Master."

"Doesn't matter. You can switch with Hartia after awhile if it's hard on you. I can't hang onto her, my arm won't move right with all these goddamn bandages."

In the back of her mind, it was aggravating to be spoken of in third person when she was standing right there beside them. But she was too tired, her mind too jumbled with tears and jangled half-sentences of thoughts to voice that opinion, whatever good it would do anyway. Instead she let go of Majic to wipe her eyes with the dark sleeve of her sweater, averting her face, breathing in with a measured, deliberate slowness to still the unending need to sob like a child that would have to subside eventually the way logic dictated.

But there were always exceptions to logic, to rules. Logic was just something made up, and she knew herself better than cold reason ever could predict the flux and tide of her emotional multitudes. She was beyond certain: it would feel like this forever. Maybe she'd get used to it. But it would never go away.

She'd already decided, and said as much as she was able, that waiting for the attentions of the scattered police would constitute days of waiting in the Inn, and they were days they didn't have the luxury of waiting in safety. Disgruntled rioters had already been back to smash the Lodge windows in the last fifteen minutes, a rain of half-filled whiskey bottles plugged with soaked and flaming cloth had shattered through the second floor windows, catching fire to a least four of the upstairs rooms, and while a blast of Bagup's shotgun deterred a second onslaught for the time, it could do nothing but delay the inevitable. By sunrise, most of the city would be engulfed, fully-involved. The wintry sky, full of fog and moonlight and low hanging clouds, it reflected back the brilliance of the flames, lighting it with a crimson glow of ethereal fire. A burning sky that blew glacial wind and spewed ice, imagery straight from a Nornir scripture, the so-called _Heavenly Ones_: all fire and doom and threats of plagues and angry gods.

Majic gave a nod, taking hold of her shoulders to push her back to arm's length, tugging the heavy cape's hood up over her elaborate nest of pinned curls while she blinked at him, then reached up and held the saddle horn for her, offering his shoulder to help her swing up. Hustling out the door with an overflowing pack, Bagup cast another fretful glance over his shoulder and into the Lodge, his face already pink from the cold, half-hidden under his fur cap, swallowed in the pelt-lined collar of his mantle.

"Dad!" Majic left her on horseback to help his father, and she watched them, that emotional frost returning, climbing like a numbing moss over her senses to grant her brief asylum from the mourning, _the weeping_, like in the Requiem they'd sung in choir at the Academy daily. For a long time, the words had been burned into her by the endless repetition. The words of the requiem, the death mass, once she could have sung them in her sleep.

Now she could barely remember the names of the movements, the black headlines on her choral notations that used to stare up at her with all their morose drama. Perhaps if she could think of them, remember them, she could focus. She could focus on that, just that, and not the howl of her broken heart when the fire, the _anger_ returned, flowering up from the vase of her heart and flash-melting the ice that had settled around her. Her anger at the world, at injustice, and especially at _God_.

_Confutatis Maledictis_, the wicked are confounded. _Dies Irae_, the day of wrath. _Lacrimosa_, the weeping. _Kyrie Eleison_…

"Hey?"

The voice made her start, speaking from closer than she might have known he was. She looked up at Orphen, mounted on a burly palomino whose name escaped her. He was snapping up the hood of his heavy woolen mantle, eyes intent on her face as though he could hear her scattered, queer thoughts.

Those eyes normally so full of the dark, now they were just full of anxiety and exhaustion, maybe concern if she wasn't just imagining it. And normally, the idea of his being concerned about her would almost make her laugh it was so embarrassing, as much as it was flattering in its own childish, selfish way.

Well, as Mariabella knew, she was nothing if not unreservedly and thoughtlessly selfish.

But just now, the idea of anybody worrying about her, but especially Orphen, it just made her feel…_guilty_. With Mariabella lying where she'd fallen, their mother and the Baroness Farrior dead in the library where they'd been completing the formal dowry contract, their cordial glasses of almond liquor spilled across the paper, erasing the wet signatures in a far too literal response to the impulsive prayer she'd dropped to her knees and begged from the God she didn't especially believe in.

_Kyrie Eleison_: Lord have mercy.

"I asked for this," she confessed to no one in particular. Except that the only person there to hear her was Orphen, still watching her warily as though he was sure she was going to fall off the horse before Majic could climb up. It could have been the first coherent sentence she'd really gotten out of her mouth tonight that wasn't an inane apology, maybe that's why he looked at her that way. "I made this happen."

With a frown cast over at his apprentice cinching up the last of Bagup's pack, he urged the palomino a couple steps closer, looking down on her slumped impotently in the saddle she was scheduled to share. "What the hell do you mean _you made this happen_?"

"After…," her voice was gummy with congestion. "After you left…before I went down to dinner."

"What.." He inclined closer, kept his voice down. "Cleo, what did you do?"

"I prayed. I prayed for something to happen that would stop the engagement from going forward."

She could feel the burn of his gaze, it was something like how her skin felt under noontime sunlight in the summer, except not warm. He didn't say anything, and with a held breath bordering on the edge of a sob, she ventured a glance at him while he leaned back in the saddle, his neck going slack to look up into the strange sky a moment before turning his tired eyes back to her.

"You can't think you can blame yourself for this. You start looking for reasons to blame yourself, you'll find them everywhere. It doesn't mean you're responsible."

"Said the kettle," she whispered. As though he had any room to talk about anybody blaming themselves for things they couldn't control.

"Listen to me. You didn't make this happen. You were desperate, people do things they don't think about when they're…emotional. How many times have you prayed for something that didn't happen? Hm? And this one time—" With his good hand, he reached out and swept over the top of her hood, dusting off snow.

How many times had she said a prayer, a genuine prayer, in hopes for it to be heard and answered? At the academy, there was a favorite saying: _God always answers prayers. Sometimes, it's just not the answer we were looking for._

That saying. It made her sick.

She hadn't said a prayer and _meant it_ since her father had died. And the truth was, she hadn't prayed even once since leaving Gauloise. No _Hail Marys_. Not a single _Our Father._ Those empty daily prayers she'd suffer through each morning, her uniform buttoned tight around her throat while she knelt on the leather knee benches that folded out from the back of the cathedral pews, hands folded, head bowed with a scarf tied over her ears according to dress code out of tribute to the divine Virgin, who became pregnant when the Holy Ghost whispered in her ear. She once thought that was so stupid; a not so subtle metaphor that hearing one wrong idea can ruin you forever. Then she'd met someone with a kind of voice that, if he'd ever bothered to whisper in her ear, she might feel a little pregnant. She knew she should cross herself for even thinking it. She shook her head, squeezed her eyes shut while Bagup was mounting the saddle on the sturdy Bay stallion named Atlas that her mother had sent out to stud at the Westerlake Estate the previous Autumn. There had been two foals by Spring. Or was it three?

What were they talking about again? Her mind was clouding up in a snowstorm of its own. Cleo ground the back of her wrist against her eyes. "My head hurts."

Orphen pushed out a lungful of breath, a billow of steam around him. "Tell me about it."

"And I shouldn't ride with Majic," she added softly, reaching out to pet the curve of Bedouin's long neck. "Little Seraphino is too small for doubles, especially over such a long distance."

"I can't…I can't hang onto you…"

"Why would you _need to_? I'm not a fucking _child_!" She found herself snapping at him, a sudden lashing out from her teary torpor, once again from frost to fire. And no, it didn't make sense and no, it wasn't even fair that she should feel suddenly angry with him, but then, nothing made any sense anymore and life was anything but fair. She was one that was still alive, how was that fair? "Majic could ride with Bagup, Atlas can hold two easy."

He blinked at her then shrugged uncomfortably, the surprise on his face giving way to a more familiar scorn. "Well, figure it out," he told her, then urged his mount forward with a tug of the hackamore bridle, vanishing quickly into the heavy fog toward where Hartia was waiting on a heavy footed buckskin named Horatio. Numbly, she watched his silhouette hunching forward and coughing in the cold, probably from smoke inhalation; another health condition obtained while saving her useless, ungrateful neck.

No, she wasn't ungrateful. She'd thanked him and meant it. She'd thanked him with a foolish kiss that she would have bestowed had it been anybody: Majic, Hartia, Ambrose Farrior, even. If he'd been the one to pull her out of that cupboard, she would have kissed him out of gratitude just the same. It just so happened, as it always seemed to be, it was Orphen who came to save her from what was really a certain, agonizing death. It was a kneejerk impulse but more than embarrassing in retrospect. Looking back on it now, thinking back on that single second, that tiny peck of a kiss, all she could think of…was Mariabella. Somehow, the all-consuming fascination she'd been nursing for the sorcerer for so long now felt so _shameful_. The ultimate betrayal. Mariabella was barely cold and already she was back to her old, self-serving conquests, taking what her only sister had wanted because she was never happy being told that anything had to be a certain way.

That hadn't been her intention at all. Not at all…wouldn't Mariabella know that? She'd been too ashamed to defend her actions when her sister had so suddenly voiced her long bottled grudge. Too dismal to even open her mouth to explain herself, if she even could. Maybe she deserved no less, to be shamed into wordless contrition.

_There's no way out for either of us._

But there had been, apparently, a way out. A way out of everything, and now she didn't want it. All it took was a violent crowd to show up on their doorstep, demanding the attention of Dr. Farrior who hadn't even been at the house, he really hadn't. But the swarm of impoverished and infected, there were so many, their collective sense of reason withered away in the presence of all that fear and anger. Even the poor feel entitled to health, to their own beloved lives. She hadn't heard the first conversations in the entry hall, only the cacophony that went along with their sudden invasion, the shouts and screams, the shattering and twisting of furniture while they poured in, intent on probing the mansion for the Doctor they insisted was hiding in the halls, as though they'd find him holed up and counting all of their hard-earned sockets, laughing and twisting his moustache like a villain in a comic strip. As though because the medicine wasn't a magical cure-all it meant the Doctor was somehow the one who should pay for their horrible misfortune.

In his own way, he had. Even if he might not know it yet. What had happened to Grays or Ambrose, she had no idea.

She'd read before that in moments of adrenaline, time slowed down. It wasn't true. It sped up, flew too fast to think and there wasn't enough time to react, to gather it in and make the right choice. There was only the animal impulse to run.

Through the firebright fog, Cleo craned her neck over her shoulder, squinted through the silver clouds of her own breath to the skyline, the grand manor on the hill that was smoldering ruby through the haze, the home where she'd spent most of her childhood before her mother had sent her off for someone else to deal with her. The place where she'd taken her first steps, spoken her first words, run across the green summer lawn laughing, catching lightning bugs in jars her mother would never let her keep. Where she'd woken to snowy holiday mornings and moonlit midnights, where she'd played the Requiem on the parlor piano the day her Father had succumbed to Diphtheria. This place of laughter and tears, snow and sunlight where now her mother and sister were burning inside, a grand funeral pyre fit for the Everlasting name.

_Lacrimosa dies illa..._ _Ah! that day of tears and mourning! From the dust of earth returning, man for judgment must prepare him; O God, in mercy spare him!_

Oh. If only there was someone to blame, on whom to exact her excruciating, teeth-gnashing revenge for what had been done; she would spare no man from it.

She didn't know when she'd started crying again, strangely she didn't even notice until her body lurched forward, dizzy and sick, slipping off the saddle to drop to her hands and knees in the snow and retch until she'd wrung her insides dry. Behind her, a wall of heat blazed up, the upstairs fire finally catching the corridors and swelling the Lin Lodge with flame. Not far away, somewhere in the alleyway, in the rabble of another furious crowd, a woman was starting to scream. The sound, it froze her; brought her back in a nauseating flash to the dark world behind the locked closet door where it was claustrophobic and hot and Mariabella was screaming wet sounds of anguish from where she could not reach. With her frozen hands, Cleo brought her palms to seal over her ears, her forehead buried against her knees, the smell of smoke and cold vomit.

"We're going!" She heard Orphen shouting and the hollow rain of hooves before suddenly he was there beside her, dropped down in the snow and dragging her up to her feet for the second time that night. He hefted her up on the stocky palomino's back and swung up in front of her, his voice a razorblade slicing through the thunder of the fire and the wind, shouting at Majic to get up in the empty saddle, for him to hurry the fuck up. Then he wheeled the horse around and dug his boot heels in hard.

With her ear against his back, the quick liquid pulse of his life there for her to hear at last, and all she could do was close her eyes and hold on.


	8. Revenant

**VIII: Revenant**

The canals were frozen over, thin ice murky as old milk glass grown atop the waterways that cut between hulking crooked henges of weathered brownstones, looming half-visible behind the hanging haze of the frozen fog. The ferries were docked, the sluice gates frosted white, all commerce halted in the onslaught of the whiteout still churning in from off the western coast. The city was buried deep in snow when they rode into town just before dusk, haggard and fatigued from thirty-seven wintry furlongs on horseback with only a few minor stops since their rushed near-midnight departure.

Even with the weather, it was remarkably quiet for a city normally lively and loud with industry. This was the great maritime republic of Alenhaten, an architectural masterwork with its grand bridges and great basalt block causeways linking the coast to the cluster of islands the city stretched over, the central hub of the western Kiesalhiman economy, and it was as frozen and dead as any wasted tundra in Masmaturia. Absent was the perpetual off-meter music of the port off the Grand Canal, cloches opening to clanging entry bells, dock workers hefting boxes, the wail of ship horns. For as deserted as the square looked, devoid of its usual infection of merchants and the capitalist, proletariat bustle of the arterial line from the outer harbor, one would think the whole city had all packed up and left overnight, leaving nothing behind but locked storm shutters and a litter of footsteps for the snow to fill in.

All the snow, it reminded Cleo of finishing school. The exclusive Institute Gauloise just outside of Sun Lake, which, despite the name, spent the winter months cocooned in low clouds, stranding the student body inescapably indoors for the majority of the Winter term with only a break for the year-end holidays. Her last year at Gauloise, four years before, the holiday break approached just in time for her mother, and therefore everyone else, to have been away tending to her dealings, or what she had taken to calling Estate Business. It had to do with lawyers and trust accounts, investments in bullion and diversified capital, real estate plots, three hundred acres in far-flung locations where no one would build for fifty years. All of the Estate Business had been in at the forefront of her mother's interest since her father's sudden death the year before, which had brought to her attention that much of the Everlasting assets were liquid, stockpiled in banks and tied up in static resources on the expansive estate grounds: structures, land, fixtures. If something had ever happened to the manor, she'd said once in a loathing half-panic, the Everlastings would have nowhere to turn. Margrave Everlasting hadn't taken much care to ensure the longevity of his family's generations of accumulated affluence, instead having invested himself in the political playground of the Meverlenst Parliament, preferring the sport of power play to investing.

Tistiny had buried herself in it after his death. If she'd been bitter about being left so possibly maybe but probably not at the mercy of the ever-fluxing fiscal system, or had just welcomed the distraction, she'd thrown herself in with the same amount of enthusiasm and rigor she spent on everything worthwhile she set about arranging. Mountains of contractual paperwork and wire transfers, midnight conferences with gaggles of suited men that smelled of tobacco and a palpable voracity for their promised commission and even more of the unsavory goods it would afford them. Cleo remembered a particular bloodshot, opium eyed leer tracking her across the corridor one of the times she'd been home for one of her mother's investment meetings, and had proceeded to lock herself into her room during the remainder of their conference.

The final holiday break at Gauloise in Sun Lake, everyone had been away. It wasn't so much that they'd forgotten her as much as she'd misled them after receiving her mother's letter that the holiday would be spent travelling on business. Her mother had imagined, not without her encouragement, that she had planned to spend the holiday drinking cocoa in a massive A-framed ski lodge with open beam ceilings and elk heads mounted over massive stone fireplaces, laughing with her friends from school. Her mother assumed she'd _had_ friends there. So when each girl had been carted off one by one in their arriving carriages, their dark-veneered barouches and cabriolets, she had watched from the third floor bay window of her dormitory, ensuring each curious party that had bothered to ask that her own driver would be along any time, to not worry about her. The student body, then the staff had all departed the school for their joyous, festive celebrations with their smiling families, garish paper-wrapped gifts and sparkling wine and Cleo Everlasting, patron saint of the aggrieved, had stayed behind for a strange, silent and frigid two weeks locked in the western residence, only venturing down to the dining hall periodically to forage in the half-bare pantries for apples and baked goods, stale madeleines, tea sachets and fig bars.

Because all she'd really wanted was to be alone.

Two weeks alone in complete, dialogue-free silence, the bizarre and unsettling liberty to go and do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. No questions to answer or appointments to keep, no prayers or signs of the cross. No mother to listen to haggling remorselessly with real estate brokers instead of sobbing into her pillows at night; Tistiny's avoidant adaptation of grief. She'd wanted to sit alone and avoid all of the light and glitter and brazen glamour of gifts and the holiday feast, everyone doing their utmost to smile gaily and pretend there wasn't someone missing from the celebration.

When she'd finally gotten home from the Institute, it was early summer. Her mother was buried in contracts and Mariabella had fallen in love with a vagabond who she'd observed skulking on the outskirts of the estate every day for nearly the past year that she'd been away, and it had only taken a few hours of home life to look back longingly to those two weeks of glorious, lonely freedom. Then, just like that, everything changed. Or maybe it already had. Maybe two weeks alone to stew in her anger and loss, preferring solitude to empty companionship had sunk deep in her bones. Looking back on it now, it might have been the original poison that had tainted her against everything. Against her mother's dreams of lifelong secure, blissful aristocratic boredom.

Sore and frozen through with a running nose and stinging eyes, she shifted in the saddle for the eight-thousandth time over the past hours, holding that same vagabond around his waist so she wouldn't fall right off Cyrano's back. The hefty palomino's name had finally come to her about three hours after the last glow of the burning Totokanta skyline had dwindled over the southern horizon, leaving them in the icy night with only the sound of hooves squeaking through new snow and Orphen's pain-labored breathing rushing like wind through a cavern as it funneled amplified into the ear she held pressed against his back. In the dark she'd held tight to him, her arms around his ribcage, check pressed against the groove of his spine. Periodically, she'd dozed, her head slipping forward and she'd feel the tug of his warm hands, pulling hers forward from where they would fall in his lap to place them on the saddle horn. Stay awake, he'd told her over and over, in the low rumble of his voice as heard through his back. _It's not safe to sleep when it's this cold. _

The horses moved northward through the dark at a brisk but unconcerned pace uncomplicated by anxiety or fear of the cold, their hurried gallop abandoned once they were out of Totokanta. They rode straight through the gray nonevent of the sunrise, past midday and into the darkening afternoon with only a few minor stops to adjust saddle straps, check bandages and rest their respective beasts of burden.

Bagup wasn't in the best way. He'd been morose, more silent than was normal for a man that had been fairly jovial even when he was milk sallow and coughing blood just a couple days after being bitten in the tavern, though he at least had improved vastly since then. There were periodic bouts of coughing from the old man, deep rattling coughs that he smothered into his furry mantle, his shoulders heaving with the effort.

He was doing just that, smothering a cough, when in front of their shuffling caravan, Hartia halted his horse suddenly, pulled his reins taut so quickly the buckskin tossed its head in protest at the sudden pressure on the bit. He reached out his hand toward the rest of the group, his palm out in a wordless but surprisingly authoritative order to stop.

Squinting against the glare of the gathered snow, even as the light dimmed with impending twilight, it was difficult to see much of anything. There was a shadow smudged in the middle distance ahead that, even through the snowblind, held an unnatural brightness of color that Cleo's tired eyes struggled to translate as clothing. A dress or cloak, colored bright red. But from the way Hartia backed his horse up, looking back at them all with his face twisted into an expression she didn't understand, the way Orphen reached back suddenly around her, catching her like she was falling off and wheeling the horse around; it didn't match up.

And then, just as quickly as she thought it didn't, it did. Because he didn't want her _to see_.

The red shadow in the snow, the more she squinted at it, it took on shape and edges. Limbs. There was a high whining sound in her ears, a grinding of vocal chords she could barely recognize as her own stricken shriek stifled in her cold palm.

The squirming red shape, it was a mess of limbs, writhing, twisting and wrenching. Men and women, tearing off mouthfuls of flesh from what was left of a half-dressed girl's body, lying bled out, marble white and gored in a frosted over lake of red snow. They were…eating her.

_They were eating her._

And Cleo, she screamed again. She hid her face, burying her head against Orphen's back while the horse shied, rearing up under them both in response to the sound and the motion of Hartia's jerking retreat. Even from the distance of a few yards, the commotion didn't go unnoticed by the heap of ravenous infected. When they had gone from mindless and feverish, biting like rabid dogs to knelt over their unlucky victims, chewing and swallowing and going back for more?

Through the fog, the pack was staggering up to their knees, climbing to their feet in the sliding, unstable snow. They staggered, barely dressed, exposed flesh graying with impending frostbite from crawling in the ice for what might have been hours after being taken over by the fever, their movements stiff and mechanical and wholly stomach turning. With her head buried, breathing fast and hot with the steam of her breath and her ear pressed just below Orphen's shoulder blade, she could hear the rise in what she'd learned over the hours was usually a slow, steady heart rate.

She heard Hartia's voice, "Back up, back _up_!"

"Master!" Majic swung around, seeking guidance where he often sought it, even in the presence of his father.

"We can get to Stephanie's if we go up along Grand Canal, due north, that way, move!"

Hartia was already headed that way, his horse kicking up a spray of dirty ice behind him as he cantered back toward the plaza and abruptly reared back, spun around with the horse protesting, tossing its head against the pull of the reins. He shouted an incantation in the other direction before he yelled to them over the resulting roar. "No good!"

The fog was far too thick to see more than shadows, _hobbling_ shadows headed toward them from the northern street. Their group was a beacon, the only source of sound in the graveyard silence of the frozen city. Hartia's attack had only hindered them, knocked them down. And now they were coming, congregating, their own flesh of a seemingly instinctive disinterest to each other. As though they already knew better than to desire a bite of diseased meat.

Behind them, there was a mechanical shucking sound, a rusty click-clack and an ear-splitting blast. The horses startled violently and Cleo swallowed another scream, one hand flying up on reflex to catch her palm against her ear through the draping, pelt lined hood of what was probably Iris Lin's best mantle.

"Dad!" Majic screeched, perched anxiously on little Seraphino, his free hand clutching at his own face.

Bagup pumped his short barreled shotgun again, letting another explosion fly into the shuffling crowd, a man's arm blew apart in a burst of red mist and scattering flesh. He staggered with the blow, and continued forward. Bagup pumped the gun, expelled the spent shell. "It's got to be done, Maj."

"_Dad_—"

Bagup blasted into the crowd again, his arm hooked around the reins, struggling with the frightened horse. He'd aimed for the head this time, and Majic cried out in breathless horror at the sight of the wet shatter of skull, stringing wet red snot and what looked like gray meatloaf.

Orphen swung the horse around again, swearing, his more functional arm still reached back around his passenger. He extended the other in front of him and barked out a strained command, "I construct thee, spire of the sun!"

Holding onto him, so unusually close the way they'd been in the manor while it had been burning and he'd been dragging her out, she felt the strange charge in the air around her, an electric bristle sweeping down the back of her neck and spine as though lightning were about to strike her. His muscles tensed at the release, the charge leaving him with a suffering grunt while the spell took its devastating explosive effect on the lumbering horde. Briefly it reminded her of a conversation years before after Orphen had nonchalantly let loose with a fiery bombshell of a spell with what seemed little empathy or regard for anyone's safety. She'd demanded Majic tell her why in the hell anyone would allow someone like him to be a sorcerer to begin with.

She'd be glad for it now if only he had the strength to be using sorcery at all, which according to Hartia, after his injury he wouldn't for days. Not safely. Hartia was already yelling his name over the thunder of the flames, and Orphen twisted in the saddle to half-face her, pulling back her hood to speak in her ear, the only way she'd hear him over the roar.

And despite the terror, her face flushed with heat that owed nothing to the wall of flame he'd ignited with his words, but rather the sound of his words themselves that lit a different kind of fire. His voice low and urgent, the Holy Ghost whispering in her ear. The subtle idea that hearing one wrong thing can ruin you forever. Something innocent and utilitarian, instructions, but for just a short second, with a feeling of undeniable intimacy. It called up lurid images in her mind of his mouth on hers, breathless and sweat-damp in the dark with his hands hot and rough on her skin, slipping under her clothes, between her legs, making her forget everything else but him. Her name, the past, even how to breathe on her own. Everything. And how she _wanted_ to forget everything if even for a few minutes.

She was exhausted; her emotions and reactions gone completely haywire and misplaced but nevertheless, she felt the absurd impulse to cross herself for thinking it at all.

He was swinging down from Cyrano a second later, and what he'd said finally took the form of language in her brain. _"Take him north."_

"Orphen!"

He didn't look back at her. Instead, he was drawing the long stiletto he always wore on his belt but rarely used in favor of the spectral one he was able to conjure. He approached the smoldering group of infected that were once again climbing to their feet, seemingly immune to any kind of pain in their inexplicable drive to continue forward. To bite. To consume. He pivoted forward with a liquid grace, in a single movement drawing his knife arm back and swinging it forward in an arc, carving into the nearest infected man's throat. While Cleo swallowed a protesting cry, still scrabbling for the dropped reins, he swung again, jamming the knife in his fist upward through the soft flesh under the man's chin, burying the lengthy blade in the soft mulch of his brain.

To empathize with these things that she'd just witnessed bent over a human body, snapping up mouthfuls of stiff, cooling flesh like a demon made little sense, but it was a gut reaction she couldn't reason her way out of. They were sick people, but _people_. Human beings that had needed Dr. Farrior's serum that hadn't received it, at least not in time, and now they were on the streets like ravenous wild animals, promoted to a horrific notch higher on the food chain though not without the cost of their humanity.

Cleo watched in dumbstruck, sick-stomached horror while Orphen dropped another two with his knife, dodging their hungry lunges while they closed in and Bagup unloaded another shell. The horse jumped under her and from the sharpness of the chill on her exposed face, there were more tears coming that she hadn't even noticed.

"Go!" She heard him yelling, and when she looked it was apparent it had been directed at her. Because she was supposed to be headed north. Because he was distracting them, risking himself so she could get through and she was just sitting there, watching. Crying. Hesitating.

"Go!" he snapped again before he wheeled around, addressing Hartia who had dismounted and continued with his fruitless attempts to dispatch them with sorcery. "Take them to Stephanie's!"

He swung and buried the blade in the flesh of a cold neck, then ripped it out, suddenly distracted, staring almost blankly at the weapon before the stabbed man's hands closed on him and he jerked back, face white, his boots losing grip on the snow. He went down hard, his head striking the icy flagstones with an audible knock and he lay, stunned and gasping while they bore down on him.

"I release thee, light's unsheathed blade!" Majic's voice was strident and afraid, but the spell at least divided the crowd enough that Cleo could see one of Orphen's legs whip up, his boot catching one of the lumbering ghouls under the jaw.

His voice blossomed out of the rift, twisted in a malicious perversion of its usual profane allure. "I confine thee, beast of the seventh circle!"

The crowd seemed to freeze before slumping, tumbling, split apart in what was not explosive, but rather like a block tower falling, piece by piece. Limbs, heads, torsos, unidentifiable viscera, slippery white piles of intestines tumbling to the floor of the plaza with a sliding, raw meat slap. In the center of the pile of butchery, Orphen knelt in the snow with a hand pressed to his head, muttering with his voice on the edge of panic. "What the fuck," he breathed. "_What the fuck_!"

Hartia was rushing forward, his face twisted in anger. "Jesus, Krylancelo! What were you thinking?"

He pulled himself to his feet with no assistance, glancing around the segmented bodies with his face bedsheet-pale and blood running out of his disheveled hair. He repeated another circuit of his anxious swearing, more to himself than to anyone.

"Were you bit?"

He shook his head, gone silent. He put his hands on his knees to catch his breath, still studying the mess with intense interest.

Majic scrambled down from his mount, forehead buckled with fearful anxiety. "Master, are you alright?"

Orphen didn't respond another long moment before his eyes came up, jumping around to each of his compatriots before he nodded again, swallowing convulsively against what might have been a rise of bile. "They don't bleed."

"Well, you do," Hartia snapped reproachfully. "What were you thinking?"

"Hartia, they don't _bleed_."

Looking down at the mess with obvious revulsion, Hartia curled a lip. "The hell do you mean they don't bleed? Of course they bleed, look at all this."

"No. _No_, I cut the jugular and...nothing. _Nothing_. Everywhere I…" he puffed out a breath before restarting. "Everywhere I put that knife…when I noticed it, I just…"

"Krylancelo, you're delirious. You know what it _does_ to you! You _know_! And after what happened to you last night, I can't believe you'd be so reckless! You could've killed yourself."

Orphen sneered silently, ignoring Hartia's reprimand and stooping down to pick up a vile section of severed arm from the ground, the snow around them stomped flat and repulsive with the slow crawl of thick, burgundy blood. He wove the cut end at Hartia, who stepped back with disgust at the sight of the cross section of muscle and bone; the syrupy, dark putrid mess that oozed in place of bright, screaming red artery blood that should have been steaming hot in the frozen air. "That seem right to you?"

Hartia's lips moved a little, but nothing came out.

"The blood is coming out, yeah, but they don't _bleed_. You cut them, blow them up, shoot them; they just keep coming. You've seen it. They don't _feel_ anything and they don't fucking bleed."

Hartia pulled in a breath and let it out in a cloud of silvery smoke.

Orphen just stared at the ground around them. He dropped the section of arm. "We've got to move."

"God's blood," Bagup wheezed, pulling up close alongside the horrific pile and craning over to look down. "This what you saw in the mansion?"

"I'm starting to wonder what it is exactly that I saw," Orphen said, tugging off a glove to touch his palm to his head and wincing at the contact.

"Master, why wouldn't they bleed?"

Still astride the big palomino's back, Cleo watched the stream of blood from Orphen's head finally drop down over his eyebrow while he hesitated to answer Majic. From the way Hartia was watching him, like he expected him to drop any second, it made her heart jump. But she wasn't clear on why. Something about the spell he'd used. Certainly she'd never heard it before.

"Because you need a heartbeat to bleed," he finally said, taking a labored breath. "These people…were dead before we got here."

Voice raw, she heard herself speak almost as though watching from afar, all her internal organs feeling knotted cold and twisting inside her, everything turned to stone. "That's not possible."

Hartia pried his eyes off Orphen to send a nervous glance her way, "Not entirely. It's not to say I've seen it before, but…revenants can theoretically be…risen with a certain kind of sorcery."

"Revenants?" Majic's voice practically vibrated, either from fear or the cold that was turning ever more severe the further the sun sunk behind the horizon.

"The dead, animated as though alive," Hartia supplied. "I'm sure you've heard stories like that. They're referred to in holy writings, folklore, that kind of stuff but actually it's…possible. Technically speaking, through Necromancy. High Sorcery, absolutely forbidden. It manipulates death and…the dead themselves. Usually it's used for communication with the dead, you know, for divination purposes. But in Nornir grimoires, they speak of skilled necromancers who can bodily raise the dead. Obviously something like that…" Hartia shook his head numbly, climbing back up on his horse and blowing hot breath into his cupped hands. "It's not taught, period. It's illegal, any knowledge of it is strictly restricted from any kind of study, even just for academic reasons. Practice of it, if it could be _proven_…"

"Why are we talking about this now? What about the fever?" Bagup interjected, sounding almost angry, or as angry as someone so weak, harassed and weary could reasonably be expected to sound under the circumstances. "I've seen people go from sitting there, all normal and quiet one minute, the next like animals. Now you're saying it's sorcery 'cos if it's something you understand it makes you feel better about what just happened? Don't make any sense, son."

"How could an infection have any effect on something that's not alive? If laws of biology were being followed here, all these people could've done nothing but lay and _rot_."

"So then, you're saying there's more than one kind of sicko going around biting people to death? You want to call it something different because these ones were eating the bodies?" Bagup shook his head with that challenge, bringing the shotgun up to lean against his shoulder.

"No…" Orphen told him, reaching up for Cyrano's bridle and steering him, and Cleo with him, away from the heap of gore with a cough. He led him northward, remaining on foot with his sticky knife still drawn, only glancing back briefly. "Let's just get where we're going. Alright? I'm sure Stephanie will have a lot to say about all this as it is. If we can make it there in one fucking piece."

ooo…ooo…ooo

It wasn't fifteen minutes before they'd reached Stephanie's doorstep, that time hopelessly silent with hypervigilant paranoia at every moan of wind and shifting shadow. The twilight deepened around the and soaked black into the frozen fog that hung like fine lace between the buildings, obscuring everything beyond a stone's throw, the great statuary of the Canal Plaza and the avenue's looming architecture swallowed in the cold gloom. With the horses tied to the fencing out front, Orphen knocked on the door for a third time with a growing air of restless impatience.

"Steph!" He knocked again, hammering the door with the heel of his hand. There was a ringing in his head now to go along with his day-long headache and the wracking ache thundering down his bones. "_Stephanie_!"

There was a clatter on the other side of the door; locks turning and shifting. The turn of a deadbolt before the door creaked open and Stephanie Brickwell appeared in that space, looking out warily with the chain bolts still latched on the door.

"Oh…!" She slammed the door and there was a rattle of metal before it swung back open, nearly crashing back on its hinges while she waved them inside, "Good gods, get in here! I didn't expect you until at least tomorrow night…"

"We didn't much have the luxury of waiting," Orphen told her, accepting her customary embrace awkwardly before she pulled back to look at the mess in front of her: his shirt stiff and dark from the previous evening's injury, the bandages peeking out under his collar, the fresh line of blood running from his hair and the mess on his hands. She glanced around at them with their drawn faces and the remnants of panic hanging in the air as through the fog had followed them in.

She surveyed the others for similar damage, herding them into the grand walnut-paneled sitting room with its blissfully bright fire. Stephanie's gaze hung on Cleo a long moment before speaking. "Well, I can see you've been doing what you do best, troublemaker. What's happened to you? Here, look at me."

"A lot," he said, twisting his head to the side while she reached up to hold it in place, holding her other arm up in front of his face.

"What time does my wristwatch read?"

"Huh?…I don't _know_; it's dark in here."

"Take a shot at it. What does my watch say?"

With a scowl, he blinked at the small timepiece. Squinted through the fire lit blear and the haze of skull-cracking pain.

"I didn't think you looked right. Your eyes are all funny; unfocused. You smack your head on something?"

"That's not what it is," Hartia hissed.

"Yes," Orphen interrupted him, throwing him a look. "I hit it on the goddamn ground while I was trying like hell not to get _eaten alive_."

When he said it, there was a beat of silence where it seemed everybody had forgotten to breathe. Then Stephanie stumbled backward a step, her eyes blinking rapidly behind her heavy framed glasses with what was an obvious, petrified understanding of what he'd meant by that cryptic comment. "Eaten…" she whispered. "Oh God. Where?"

"In the plaza. We would have gone around if we'd known what we were looking at, but…the fog…" he trailed off, turning to clear his throat with a half-cough into his fist.

"Oh no. Oh God. What did you see?"

"It's debatable, apparently." Hartia told her, tugging off his cloak jerkily. "You seem familiar with the problem. We came across them while they were picking on some human carrion."

Stephanie pulled in a breath, knees buckling and dropping her onto the sofa, her hands clutched into fists inside the long knit sleeves of her pullover. "So quickly," she said. "How has it happened so quickly?"

"What has?"

She looked up at Hartia gravely, shifting on the davenport, restlessly winding her arms around her abdomen. "What do I even call it? Rhinehold? The epidemic was further out in the country, as far as what I'd read, but so far there were no cases in the city that had been reported. But at the dig site…only hours after we opened up the rectory…after I sent the telegram. Oh! Did you get the telegram?"

"Yes, I got it. You didn't say anything was wrong."

"It wasn't…then, it was. Just like that. The whole team was down with it. Just in a few hours, they were all…I can't…I can't explain it. Neither could any doctors." Stephanie tugged on her hair a little, gathering it in her hands and letting it free again. "The hospital was overrun and…they couldn't take any more. They said the infected were biting people, spreading the germs in their saliva to the bloodstream and it was spreading. The chemist ran out of the treatment by the evening, People were leaving in droves, getting out of the city. I guess maybe headed where there was treatment available. In the plaza, there were those protestors, you know the ones…"

"The Dragon Believers? From the Bazilkok site?"

"They had a congregation in the square, stirring people up even worse than they already were. They were standing up on the rise of fountain, preaching. Doomsday stuff. People were fighting outside the apothecaries and sundry shops, they were breaking into houses. I had to come home and lock the doors…"

Orphen coughed again. For hours it had felt like he was still trying to breathe through smoke, and sucking in the thin cold air all day had only exacerbated the problem. With a restrained cringe, he undid the clasp of his mantle, valiantly ignoring the renewed electric throb in his wounded shoulder.

"The Dragon Believers have always relied on sensationalism to rally support for their radical belief system, it's nothing new. Does anybody want some tea?"

"You don't look too well yourself, Steph."

"I guess not," she agreed, gathering her long hair at the nape of her neck again, smoothing it in her hands. "Tim went out a few hours ago to help at the chemist's and…I guess I'm a wreck sitting here waiting for him to come back when I know…I know how badly things have deteriorated out there. But Wayne is a friend of ours, and he was so short handed…I couldn't ask Tim not to…and with the rioters… There's not a lot they have that can help, you know, and the Rhinehold treatment…"

"It's expensive. We've been over this. Bagup was bitten a few weeks ago but was treated quickly. How you feeling, old man?"

In an armchair, still in his pelt-lined hat, Bagup slapped his own thigh. "Takes more than a few nasty germs to put me down. My rear end might be a little worse for wear after that excursion, though, I tell you what."

"He was treated?" Stephanie's eyes held the inevitable question that obviously the Lins weren't the type that could easily afford the serum, but Orphen would have preferred to postpone that particular part of the explanation for later when no one else was listening, though it was likely too much to ask to be free of Hartia's hawk-stare for that long.

"He finished the regimen. You said tea? I'll take anything at this point."

"Oh, of course. Did you ride straight through the night? I can't imagine how else you could have arrived so quickly. You only left yesterday afternoon…" She was up and headed toward the kitchen and he followed, his redheaded shadow close behind.

Sitting at the kitchen table in the bright, terracotta tiled galley, Orphen waited for her to fill the kettle and light the samovar before continuing. "How long as Tim been gone?"

Stephanie, still facing the iron stovetop, hesitated before replying quietly. "Too long." She turned to them, pulling out one of the wooden chairs methodically and dropping into it, pulling in a slow, breath. "Since late last night. I've been locked up here since, just…waiting. I don't want to…" She swallowed mid-sentence before continuing. "I don't want to consider the possibility that he…might not be alright. I think he's staying with Wayne. You saw yourself what it's like out there. And apparently things aren't much better in Totokanta if you're here."

"No, it's the same." With effort, Orphen kept his voice low, folding his arms on the table to steady himself enough to explain. "Riots. Fires. Fatalities in huge numbers, even with the treatment. The Lin Lodge was burning when we left. And Cleo's house. Her family… everybody's dead."

Stephanie's mouth opened, her brow buckling. "Oh," she whispered tearfully. "_Oh_. No. _God_. I thought…I knew something was... Oh, the poor…"

"These...things. The infected people. They were there, in her house. It's a long story, but they were there. We didn't get too close, but… Now we're seeing them here, eating fucking _bodies_, lurching around like they don't know what they are or what they're doing. Typical invocations don't deter them at all, they don't seem to feel pain. They don't bleed."

She was pulling off her glasses to wipe at the tears underneath with her sweater sleeves. "What do you mean they don't bleed?"

"Just that. They don't bleed when you cut them."

"And here's shit-for-brains Krylancelo using a blood hex to bring them down after he almost bled to death last night and shouldn't be even unlocking doors on his own."

"Way to change the fucking subject, Shrimp Man."

Stephanie turned a horrified look on him. "_Orphen_. What were you _thinking_? You want to end up like me?"

"Jesus, let it go. I'm fine. It was either that or get chewed up."

"You don't exactly look fine," she scolded. "You want to end up bled dry? Or dead? And what the hell happened last night?"

"Cleo stabbed him."

At Stephanie's mystified gape, Orphen wove his hand. "It was a mistake. Can we focus on these revenants?"

"_Revenants_? You mean the infected? You think..._what_?"

"Dead. They're stone dead. Whatever is keeping them moving, I can't even…"

"Wait, okay? Just," she put her hands up. With her glasses off, eyelashes wet with tears for what likely wasn't the first time that day, she looked a lot more like Stephan than Orphen had seen in a long time. Like the pretty-faced, long-suffering young boy she had once been. "Just give me a minute, okay? There's too much. With everything that's happened already, and now you all. And poor Cleo. And now you're telling me you've been fighting off infected people? I heard they were biting and had to be restrained. Now you're telling me that they're attacking."

"They—"

She held up her hand. "You're telling me they're _attacking_. They're out there eating bodies like vultures. And they aren't put down with anything but something as extreme as a blood hex? They don't bleed? God. _God_! What…what are you _saying_?"

They exchanged looks at her rapidly mounting hysteria before Orphen answered, suddenly feeling the pull of exhaustion more than ever, barely pushing the words out strongly enough for her to hear. "I don't know, Steph. I don't know what to say about any of it."

Stephanie hid her face in her hands a moment, pulling her fingers down her cheeks with her brow creased, her eyes intent on the table top for a long, silent minute before she looked up and spoke in an wooden, almost sepulchral tone. "Gris Cygnus."

"…What?"

Slowly, she shook her head. "I can't believe I'm saying this."

"Saying_ what_?"

"'_It will sweep through like wind and blood will run black in their veins_," she recited mechanically, letting out another one of those long, controlled breaths. "_Those fallen will rise up again to do the ravenous bidding of the__ voidborn hunger __until none among the treacherous breed draw breath in the land of the impure_.' From the Book of Epiphany. It's about the coming of Gris Cygnus, the disaster that destroyed the Nornir."

"Disaster?" Hartia whispered, then jumped when Orphen stood suddenly, his chair clattering to the floor behind him a little more dramatically than he'd have preferred.

"Blood will run black?"

"That's—"

Already he was pulling on Stephanie, towing her up and out of her chair. "Get up," he insisted, leading her by her arm back into the sitting room despite her perplexed semi-protest, her hands pushing her glasses back onto her face.

"Bagup," he was calling while they pushed through the swinging kitchen door. "Your arm. Would you mind showing Stephanie where you were bitten?"

Blinking, the old man compiled quietly while Majic and Cleo looked on. He rolled up his shirtsleeve, carefully unfastening the bandage with his big fingers and unwinding it to reveal the wound; the branching dark scarring that climbed his arm, a deep green-black like something festering and necrotic that tracked along his veins. Orphen had been disturbed by it before. Now, he was almost shaking.

"Everything alright?" Bagup asked while Stephanie gaped at his arm, her breathing coming fast and labored. In the charged silence, Orphen thought he could almost hear the rolling thunder of her heartbeat.

Instead, in the kitchen, the tea kettle was beginning to scream.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

To be continued…


	9. Common Ground

**IX: Common Ground**

"I'm just so surprised," Stephanie said breezily, forcing such a carefree tone that it might have been worse than if she'd simply said what she was thinking. She pushed her glasses back into place, the corner of her bottom lip drawing up between her teeth for just a moment. "You don't hear much about anybody getting better, you know. You're a very lucky man!"

"I certainly am. Who else can say that someone thought enough of them to be that generous," Bagup said proudly. He shot a tired smile over to where Cleo sat by the hearth and Orphen watched her struggle to return a watery reciprocation of the same fondness, but it looked painful and subsequently, felt similar; like a tiny needle between his lungs that he still felt through even the varied aching layers of misery in his body. Her hair was still pinned up, the elaborate pincurl nest now wilted and frayed just like everything else that had once been seemed so perfect about her little gold-plated existence. With her sitting there, glassy eyed and absent, there was the most peculiar sense that he was looking at a stranger.

"It's been a hard day," Stephanie sighed, her merry voice deflated from its former counterfeit glory. "I'm certain you're all exhausted, it would be cruel of me to keep you all from some rest, as hard as it might be to relax after what you've gone through. Hartia, maybe you can show Majic and Cleo upstairs? There's only the two guest rooms, but…"

Hartia's folded arms fell to his sides, his eyebrows lifting up briefly, "Muh? A-oh, _yeah_, alright. No problem. Majic, let's get these bags, huh?"

Majic, not stupid by any means but exhausted and unassuming enough not to question, was already hefting both his and his father's pack straps over his shoulder, reaching out a hand to Cleo to help her stand, even if she may not have required assistance. They had disappeared up the stairwell long before Stephanie let out another one of those long, harried breaths and turned her attention back to Bagup, sitting patiently in the oxblood leather armchair, waiting for the other shoe to drop. So, naturally, he dropped it himself.

"You're skeptical about my condition. I can see that without you saying so."

"I'm sorry…if I was impolite. I haven't really heard of anybody that has…you know. Survived. The mortality rate, on a timeline of a month or so… according to the literature, it's almost one-hundred-percent."

"But _not_ one-hundred-percent. Since here I am, and all. The doctor explained it all to me, best he could anyway. Said it can take a matter of hours or days, weeks before there are symptoms. It depends on the concentration of the infection, or how you were exposed to it, I guess. I read every bloody pamphlet he left me. Nothing else to do anyway, layin' in bed with fever chills and too sick to walk. Coupled with the fact the doc was there within a couple hours of my bite and that maybe I got a small amount, he said my chances were damn good so long as I took the shots when I was supposed to and didn't miss any."

"If you don't mind me asking, Mr. Lin…"

"Ah. Bagup. People only call me Mr. Lin if they're renting a room from me," The old man flashed a grim smile, his mouth stretched ruefully under his wide, gray moustache. "Guess they won't be doin' that no more, huh?"

"Bagup," Stephanie shook her head. "How in the world did you get so lucky as to get hold of such an expensive treatment so quickly?"

"Luck!" Bagup nearly laughed, "Doctor Farrior, you know, he developed the treatment. He'd just gotten into town with a shipment; the apothecary wasn't keeping much in stock. Guess it spoils easy and has to be kept real cold. Something like that. He brought it into town the day before, and, just a stroke of luck that through my son we know Miss Cleo. Doll brought it as soon as she heard."

"Cleo brought it?" She turned her head toward Orphen, who had dropped his forehead in his hand. "You don't need a prescription to—?"

"I'm sure I would've, probably would've died waiting for it, too. But seeing how Cleo's engaged to the doctor's son, she could bring it in no time," he chuckled almost incredulously. "Like I said. Stroke of powerful luck. Should've bet on the dog races, ain't probably nobody luckier than me that day."

There was a beat of silence, and Orphen glanced up to find Stephanie staring daggers at him. Or maybe it was pity. He often had a hell of a time telling the difference because either way, he hated it. He did his best to affect a neutral expression.

"Orphen tell you that the others that got bit same time as me didn't get sick?"

Another sidelong stare from Stephanie prompted a flat response. "The others didn't get it, he says."

"I heard him," she said over her shoulder before addressing Bagup again. "Are you certain they didn't? You just said yourself that the fever doesn't always have the same gestation period in everyone. Have you seen them since then? The others that were bit when you were?"

"Sure, 'bout a week ago. They're both regulars at the tavern. They came to visit, see how I was doing. Seemed right fine to me. Guess it's hard to say now."

In Stephanie's responding silence, Orphen dropped onto the sofa near the old man. "Hartia told me last night that some of the team that opened up the rectory yesterday caught some spore and had to go to the hospital…"

"That's what they thought," she sighed. "It's not that uncommon to catch a respiratory bug from mold or spore dust in rooms that have been sealed up for a thousand years. They were all sick so quickly after the door came down, and it was just the ones in the front, who would have caught the most concentrated air. It's just standard procedure to have them checked in and looked at. It wasn't until...well, I guess it was a few hours later. A messenger came from the hospital to the University about the quarantine. They shut down the whole hospital. Everyone from the dig site was in what they called advanced stages, and that it was Rhinehold and…" Stephanie's shoulders dropped a little. "I don't understand it, not even a little. One minute…everything was okay, you know? Then…god. Then it's just like everything went crazy all at once. How could they all be so sick, so quickly? How could it be spread everywhere…it doesn't seem real. And how could all of them come down with the fever at the same time…and none of them were bitten. Everything I've read says Rhinehold is pathogen based, not an airborne virus."

"I meant to ask you about that…"

"There's no reason to ask me anything," she removed her glasses again to push the heel of one hand into her eye with palpable tension. "I don't have any answers."

"It's not about the disease. About the translation you sent in the telegram."

"Oh." Sitting slumped in the firelight with her long sweater and tired eyes, she almost smiled. Perhaps it was just the prospect of being asked about something she understood. There was little more she couldn't stand than being in the dark. It was her thirst for knowledge that had ultimately ruined her career in sorcery. Accidents stemming from such lusts were a common cause of fatalities or worse when it came to those with sorcery in their blood, their narcissism a kind of innate Achilles' heel. "What about it?"

"It's just…kind of morbid, was all. For a temple. And even more since, if I'm not confused, you told me that places of worship never had runes."

"Well, that's not…entirely untrue. Don't think I didn't question it myself. The Nornir believed that temples were places to be closer to the Gods from whom they were separated. Speaking was forbidden as was any kind of text, even in the art, in order to have ultimate silence in the spirit through which to hear the voice of the Gods. Following that, of course, it seems strange the site is so covered in text. But the _structure_…the layout especially, it's practically a cathedral. It's built as part of an existing sanctuary complex. It was thought that perhaps that section of the structure predates the doctrines regarding speech."

"And…what about tombs?"

"Tombs? What about them?"

"Is it typical to see runes there? Especially passages like the one you sent in the telegram?"

Stephanie nodded. "Exceedingly. But a tomb would never connect with a worship house. Death was considered something terribly unclean by the Nornir. Translation on some of the more vast passages would be helpful in answering this question, since its likely to have some reference to the events timeline to help us date the complex. It's going to be difficult, with some of the more archaic rune sets I can only get a literal translation of phrases that read like idioms. There's one phrase in particular that keeps repeating that we just can't crack. Vreecti-dvelt-noctum…"

"And Gris Cygnus?"

"Well, I haven't seen that referenced in anything I've gotten translated just yet but…" She swallowed nervously. "I can't deny that…there are obvious similarities, at least superficially, that make me uncomfortable. I guess it doesn't help with those Dragon Believer wackadoos shouting about it in the square. Honestly, I gave it all very little thought at the time. I didn't even consider what they were saying would have any merit whatsoever."

Stephanie shook her head, giving him one last long glance before turning back to look back down at the dark scarring on Bagup's arm. "If it…if it _is_ Gris Cygnus…_nobody_ would have _seen_ it before. Just, you know. Paintings. Illuminated manuscripts. Scholars on the Nornir have always tended to view Gris Cygnus as less of a _real thing_ than it was a metaphor for corruption or treachery. Even taken more literally, a venereal disease. There wouldn't be any research to confirm it. We have nothing to go on except an old gospel and a bunch of religious nut jobs."

"Last night, at the Inn. Now that I'm thinking about it, there was this pissed off kid who said something…kind of similar. Wish I could remember exactly what he said. He said sorcerers were to blame for it…"

Stephanie gave a tired little shrug. "That's a little farfetched, but…the Gris Cygnus, in the Book of Epiphany, it's a punishment. The Gods were furious with the Nornir, the most educated of all the dragon families, for mixing their so-called divine bloodline with the lowly creatures of the land. _Humanity_. For passing down the sacred gift of sorcery to inferior beings, they were branded heretics by the Gods, and their wrath took the form of the Gris Cygnus…withering the population to eventual extinction, save the mixed blood of descendants. There's an elaborate story to go with it, something about a demon being summoned…I'd have to look it up."

Orphen shook his head slowly. "But that story makes it sound like there were humans around at the time. Even the mixed offspring. Why didn't they die off from the disease?"

Stephanie shrugged again feebly, bending to plant her elbows on her knees. "They might have, or maybe the Gods granted them some kind of immunity, for their innocence in the matter. The writings never address mankind more than it must, just in passing. The way more modern gospels might talk about lambs or cows, sacrificial meat."

"That doesn't sound like any Gods I've ever read about, being so objective."

"You can't remember what the kid said? So he blamed sorcerers for the Rhinehold outbreak? What else did he say?"

Orphen scrubbed a hand through his hair and winced, sucking in a sharp breath when his hand swept over the swollen knot where his head had struck the plaza floor. "I can't…I really can't remember. There was a lot going on. All the people, shouting, looking for the doctor. They were all sure that the treatment doesn't actually work and ready to take his head off for getting their hopes up."

Bagup wove a hand. "Doesn't surprise me they'd say that. First few days, I felt the same way. But I kept on taking it; Majic made me, even when I didn't want another one of those goddamn painful shots. Eventually, I started feeling it. People want a miracle cure. They want to be able to take one dose and cough it up, you know? I had to get two of those big confounded needles in my arm twice a day for two weeks. And I'd of never been able to afford all of it, neither. Don't be so sure it don't work just because they couldn't either."

Uncomfortably, Orphen shifted on the cushion, his head echoing a massive pain like the great cloche of a belltower resounding the thunderous clang of a church bell. "Bagup. Just in case, I need to ask you. What if it _doesn't_ work?"

The old man settled back against the pillowy backrest of the sofa. He'd never noticed it before, but Majic had the same nose. "It…_already_ worked…"

"I know that. But that arm of yours isn't looking like it belongs to someone healthy. It looks worse than when I last saw it. So, let's just say. We wake up in the middle of the night tomorrow…or three days from now. And you're dragging around the house, trying to take a bite out of anyone you can find. Me, or Stephanie. Your son. Then what?"

"I'm fine, Orphen. I mean it, I'm fine. Farrior said the scarring is inevitable, and it might not ever go away. Trust me on that." The old man took a long, slow breath. "But I tell you…that happens, what you just said? You see me…turning into something like what we saw." He twisted to the side, picking up the shotgun he'd left leaned up against the side of the sofa, and handing it over with a serious face. "I mean, _the second_ you see me try to hurt somebody like that, you put me out of my misery the way you know works. Don't you worry about trying to save me."

With the fire-warm gun in his sticky hands, Orphen nodded. Even with the old man's blessing to blow him away, he'd still never get to sleep with the thought wandering in the aching, stress-torched wasteland of his mind. But with everything that happened, everything he'd seen in the last day, it would be a miracle if he got to sleep ever again.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

Before Hartia had the lantern lit in the guest quarters, someone outside, they screamed. Someone far away with her voice muted by the distance, she screamed, and then was silenced; the sound cut off so abruptly it rose up a cold sweat under his clothes.

This was a nightmare. He wanted to wake up. Desperately, he wanted to open his eyes and find himself almost anywhere else, or inversely, he just wanted to curl up under a quilt and sleep for a week. Unfortunately, the most difficult days when all he wanted was to sleep and get away from everything was exactly when sleep wouldn't come. He worried that when he finally lay down tonight, his nerves and overactive brain would trump his exhaustion, and he'd end up staring at the ceiling. Sitting awake while Krylancelo paced or sat fuming in the dark nearby, in the familiar way he'd done in the days following Azalie's accident, before the funeral the school had held for her with its strange unspoken secret and empty coffin. The faculty had put out a very forward threat that any questioning in the matter of Azalie Kettoshi would have the pupil expelled and either sent home or back to whatever orphanage from which they had been procured. In Hartia's case, home would have been far worse than any orphanage he could even imagine. He'd never told Krylancelo why taking the risk of believing him…at the time, it was something more horrifying than he could bear. Being sent home where his father, smelling of tobacco smoke and barley, shouted at him. Called him a warlock, that red hair was the mark of the devil and beat him with a belt even for speaking. He screamed at his frail mother, that she'd been bedded by the beast to produce a redheaded sorcerer child, that she was the devil's whore. His mother, weak and bed bound during the pregnancy with his younger sibling whom he'd never met, she'd eventually signed his legal guardianship over to the Tower, and there he had mercifully remained.

So, back then, he'd kept his mouth shut. Firmly, ignorantly shut. If the Tower said Azalie was dead, as much as the news flattened his heart, then she was dead. Krylancelo, for all of his brilliance, had been beside himself with denial, sitting awake night after night with a rising, quiet rage. His way of processing his grief over Azalie, to whom he was so inseparably close, was rejecting the idea that she could be dead, simmering in anger and pointing his finger, blaming others for not saving her because he hadn't the power to do it himself. No one could have.

But the blank look Krylancelo had turned on him that day at the funeral, that day he'd seemed to realize that he didn't—wouldn't—believe him at the expense of his sanctuary away from home, it had kept him awake for months. That cold, wounded look of the betrayed. Especially after the truth had found its way into the hushed rumors of the student body: Azalie was alive, and the Tower elders were tracking the abomination she'd become in order to kill her off and spare the school another enormous scandal. In the Tower's eyes, a dead student was always preferable to one hideously and dangerously transmogrified when left unsupervised in a lax regulatory environment. And that Krylancelo, long disappeared and assumed-dead Krylancelo, had been right.

Tragedy often found its way to the Tower. First they'd had to deal with the loss of Komikron. Then, just a short two years later, beautiful and brilliant Azalie.

Then, Hartia alone, he'd had to deal with the loss of Krylancelo, who no longer existed. Or insisted he didn't, for when he finally found him, the bright, witty boy had been replaced with a morally challenged, dead-eyed rogue who called himself Orphen, as though he really did think he was a different person simply by declaring it so. But sometimes, that seemed more like the truth than he'd originally been able to understand. Like today, watching Krylancelo not even flinch while he severed a man's throat with a knife.

A _knife_. No sorcerer with any sophistication would use his hands in a fight. It disgusted him as much as it worried him. Even thinking about it…

"Hartia?" Majic was fumbling in the dark, swimming his hands out in slow motion to find a point of reference. "What's wrong?"

"Oh…ah, I'm sorry. Ignite."

The lanterns jumped to life around them, revealing Majic in the corner with his and his father's packs. The room was rather nice for guest quarters, really. Two wooden sleigh beds and a wood burning stove took up most of the space in the room, but the wooden floors were highly polished, the bookshelves stocked and dusted. The same omnipresent scarlet velvet draperies and wooden shutters that dominated the walls of most of the rooms did the same job here between two rather poor paintings of bare winter trees, gifts from Stephanie's mother in law. This was where Tim's parents stayed when they visited, she had explained to him months earlier when he'd come to stay for the dig. In fact, his most recent rune transcriptions were still spread out of the rolltop desk in the far corner.

"You and your Dad will be comfortable in here, I'm sure, Maj."

"W…where are you going to sleep, Hartia? Weren't you staying here?"

"Yeah, but no worries. I'm sure Cleo will share with me, right?" With a sidelong glance, immediately he regretted joking with her. The delayed, strained smile she forced made him look away with a knot tied somewhere in his intestinal tract. It was his folly that making jokes had long been his method of cycling stress. It was a terrible defense mechanism because it didn't really work anyway.

"Sorry, I'm just joshing. I'm worn out. Sure you both are too."

Cleo stood silent while Majic eyed him, finally giving voice to what was obvious. "They sent us up here so we couldn't hear what they were going to talk about, right?"

Hartia leaned back on the wall, letting all the air out of his lungs with an exhausted shrug. "Probably…something like that. Don't ask me, I don't know what's going on. I don't think anybody has any clue. This day…this whole situation. I don't even know what to say about it."

"I'm…we're not kids, you know," Majic wasn't quite glaring, but he looked plainly unhappy. The corner of his mouth drawn up tight on one side in an irritated grimace. "If it's about what's happening, all of us should be able to talk about it together instead of sending us upstairs like a bunch of children."

"I'm sure that's not what was intended. No one thinks either of you are incapable of handling what's going on. I don't. Majic, you performed out there quite well! Krylancelo would say so as well if he wasn't…well. He's had it rough too, you know? He handles situations like these by going straight for the solution. Like jumping off a horse and attacking with a weapon like a barbarian. To him, anything that isn't directly solving the problem just gets in the way."

"So we were in the way?"

Hartia wove his hands. "That's not—"

A spark seemed to hit Cleo at the mention of the fight in the square, her rusty voice coming out soft and disused, but welcome as an interruption. "What happened out there? Why were you so upset? I…don't think I've ever heard that command before."

"Good. Let's hope you don't ever again," he spat with more force than he'd intended. "It was a blood hex. And he should know better. Especially being injured."

Majic sat down on the foot of the bed, reaching down to unlace his boot with his unusual sour attitude still lingering, "You said that before. What is it? Why have I never heard of such a thing?"

"It's high magic, far beyond anything you've learned so far. Indescribably dangerous. You know, sorcery affects elements and matter, but can only deal physical damage via means of manipulating those things, and draws energy from your mental force. A blood hex…" Hartia gave a jerky shrug, angry again just explaining it. "It pulls energy from your life, your health. And in exchange for the damage you do to yourself, it in return deals that damage elsewhere as an actual destructive force. Kind of like transferring energy through a fulcrum, I guess. Could cut a man in half if the user didn't mind some permanent damage and a good amount of pain."

In their responding silence, impulsively, Hartia kept speaking. "We had a friend. Krylancelo and I, back in school. We were…god, thirteen maybe? Still kids. Probably my only other friend I was really close to. He was one of those types. You know, like Azalie. Always trying to outdo everyone. Especially Krylancelo, man, did they have an ongoing battle for superiority. Komikron, he had this lab in his room, all this old equipment he'd restored and salvaged out of the garbage. A bunch of crap, mostly. He'd read about all kinds of alchemy and lost sorcery and he'd try to replicate them. Usually he'd just end up with a huge mess. No one ever thought much of it, just that he was curious and kind of a know it all and he'd never listen to you anyway if you told him he shouldn't do something." He took a long breath. "I heard about blood hexes from Komikron. He told us all about them, how berserker sorcerers in the second age had used these kinds of spells to defeat the first siege of the Kimrak Church. He got obsessive about stuff like that. But. We never thought…"

Hartia cleared his throat. Why he was even talking about this now, he didn't know. He guessed because he'd thought about Komi earlier. And because as much as he wanted to go to sleep, laying down and being alone with his thoughts might not have been the best treatment for the trauma of the last twenty-four hours.

"What happened to him?" Cleo hugged herself inside the borrowed mantle, looking more present than he'd seen her since the fire.

"He died. They found him in the lab. The last person to see him alive, he was another of Childman's students named Korgon. He swore he'd had nothing to do with it, knew nothing about it, but…" Hartia shook his head, pushing hair off his face with his hand. "I never did believe him. It was hard to believe anything he ever said anyway. From the state of…from how they found Komi, it was pretty apparent he'd been trying a blood hex…or that maybe somebody had done one on him. They never made anything official."

Hartia watched Cleo struggle with a surge of emotion that she let ebb before she tried to speak again. "_W__hy_ would he do something like that?"

"Krylancelo did it, presumably, because he was desperate to do some actual effective damage to those…things. Arts like that, they're the only real offense a sorcerer has against things of, well, unknown origin like that. Arcane things. Things that won't be wounded otherwise, I guess. But with the kind of injury from last night, drawing any kind of energy can be detrimental to the health. To say nothing of…something like _that_. I'm sure he's feeling far from well right about now, but he's just lucky he didn't drop dead. He damn well could have."

From the look on her face, it was becoming clear that maybe he should've kept his mouth shut instead of saying that last part, considering everything. The tears shining in Cleo's lovely bloodshot eyes said a lot, she was already sensitive enough to his health. He was in poor shape mostly because of her, after all. To say nothing of her obvious and increasingly inexplicable devotion to the idiot. He would be the first to admit that his education in the subject of women was far from complete, but Cleo's curious and hostile brand of evident affection toward Krylancelo was far beyond his understanding. Certainly, the guy was good looking, he always had been, even as kids. But, as he was now, his appeal seemed to end there. But for every Cleo Everlasting there was also a Constance Magee and a Hyrietta the Hyena, and each of them had far too taken with his abrasive, impolite friend. If he thought about it, it was likely he'd had all of them.

Hartia could never compete or even catch up. He'd was pretty sure he'd never understand it, either.

"I'm sure he's alright," he amended lamely. "Krylancelo's tough, you don't have to worry about him, you know that. Now let's get you to a room, huh?" With her eyes downcast, Cleo nodded vaguely.

Majic was busy pulling his boots off, his blond head still bent down low, Hartia still didn't miss him wipe at his eyes with the back of his hand. No, he wasn't a child. But better he be angry and insulted now than worried all night over what they might be discussing downstairs with his father and that devastating necrotic wound. The more he thought of it, the more he'd prefer to sit up all night listening to Majic's defensive teenaged irritability finally starting to kick in than think about waking up with Bagup gnawing on his throat. Silently, Cleo unloaded her small pack onto the bed in the second room, the one Krylancelo had been in previously. Ever the hostess, Stephanie had changed the sheets in their daylong absence. He watched her a moment, fumbling for something reassuring or sympathetic to tell her and only succeeded in lingering unflatteringly in the doorway. Turning to leave, closing the door behind him, he leaned into the doorway one last time, speaking quietly enough that it wouldn't carry across the hallway.

"Lock your door. Okay?"

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

This was as close as he'd been to sleeping in days: lethargic and nervous in front of a fire with a mild concussion and a loaded shotgun. Just him, the copper glow, the warm clutch of wood and metal in his hands, a howling wintry silence behind the bolted storm shutters. This was rest, a tiny vacation, despite that the pain in his shoulder had its own feverish pulse behind the clever veil of painkillers and his cranium felt full of clouds. Maybe if he pretended that it was really just a storm keeping them here, he could relax enough to drop off for a few minutes. He needed something to hold him over, keep his brain working, for however long it could.

The adrenaline high that had fueled their hasty escape from Totokanta, that had carried him through his admittedly reckless measures in the Canal Plaza, that lingering buzz of fight-or-flight was tapering off, and underneath was paralyzing shock and a crawling anxiety which reminded him that every scratch or thump of tree branches on the roof was just as likely to be something stumbling through the ice, craving the warm wet rush of bloody flesh crushing between its teeth and throwing its nerveless hands against the outside walls, looking for a way in. Worse, his jittery paranoia only contributed to a growing unease about being locked in the house with Bagup, no matter how well he was supposedly feeling. And Bagup asleep upstairs with Majic in the same room and Cleo just across the hall…that was even worse.

Maybe it was exhaustion, but the more he thought about it, especially in the silence of the dark house with everybody asleep but him, he was suddenly a lot less certain. Upon examination, Bagup seemed fairly healthy. The infection scars branched up his arm, but stopped around the bend of his shoulder, and he insisted they weren't probably ever going to go away. It was Stephanie's suggestion that his bite having been so low on his arm, just a few inches above the wrist, had slowed the spread of infection through his nervous system. She'd postulated in private that, perhaps, treatment had been administered before it reached the spinal cord. She'd talked about the limbic system, the amygdala, and had somehow had gotten around to how this was maybe why Bagup hadn't ended up like so many of these others.

Or, with that slow spread that had supposedly saved him, maybe the infection just hadn't gotten where it was headed yet; wherever it needed to get to before Bagup turned into the same kind of staggering, bloodless walking cadaver he'd been blowing away in the plaza.

That mental image, more than anything, had been the best reason to accept the loan of the shotgun. Certainly he'd been railed for his choices in defensive measures enough for one day, but the distasteful irony of maybe having to take down the old man with his own firearm, in front of his own son no less, was enough to keep him on the waking side of the nightmares that were all too likely stalking the jungle of his impending sleep.

Probably it was better to stay awake at this point. As soon as he was asleep, he'd wake up sick. Maybe he'd scream, jolt awake from the terror waiting under the deceptive, peaceful shroud of slumber, like many-faced sea monsters seething silently beneath the calm surface of a dark lake. Some of them would be the faces of the men he'd killed in the square, some the sneering countenances of the petulant mob in Totokanta, and others would be Mariabella the way he'd last seen her, waxen and pallid with her eyes staring vacantly as a doll.

If only he had known to be there sooner. He'd let it happen again. Someone important had been taken away, and they'd left her behind. Hadn't even buried her. And now, his brain was flooded with the idea that maybe, dead or not, she might have still been somehow aware while they'd left her behind on the floor to burn with the rest of the manor. Like the men in the square who didn't bleed.

How could something dead still be able to move? Biology, it just didn't work that way. Even the way Stephanie had explained it, according to the literature, the limbic system, the amygdala and the something-cortex…it didn't make any sense. Biology relied on living material.

He guessed that, somehow, they just weren't…exactly…dead. Dead by anybody else's standards, maybe. But not in-the-ground dead. However that could possibly work.

Or, he could be right in that there was necromancy involved. But how or why, he couldn't come up with anything convincing. Not in his exhausted state.

This jittery kind of paranoia where everything was concerned probably was fairly natural, considering. He didn't know where it came from, if he ever knew, but there was the usual feeling of increasing personal responsibility when it came to the safety of everyone involved. Like somehow all of this was his fault, even if it wasn't.

Like Cleo, making herself responsible for what had happened at the mansion because she'd desperately prayed for a way out of her engagement.

He'd reasoned with her when she said it, told her the truth. People did strange, impulsive things when they were emotional and desperate. He knew because he'd done them himself. Things that made Cleo's self-accusations seem so innocent. Probably because she was just that: innocent. She couldn't have had less to do with the disaster that had befallen her family, any more than he could have stopped Azalie from tampering with such supremely dark magicks she should have known better than to ever touch. But afterward, once the shock had worn off and the fury had set in, his vicious, furious thirst to destroy the Tower's plans had been the only thing that had kept him alive.

His indignant rage. It had been something to focus on, to hold him up, so he didn't buckle under the weight of his own misery. Probably that wasn't far from how Cleo was feeling now. Though she didn't seem angry. She didn't seem like she was anything. Stephanie had gone up before bed to loan her a nightgown and offer her a sedative, which supposedly she'd accepted without resistance. Further evidence that she was patently not herself. It was concerning, though perhaps he was just a little over sensitive to her situation. If he wasn't always a little over sensitive to anything that had to do with her to begin with.

Normally, she had as much a tendency to react with anger as he did. They were alike that way. When he put some thought into it, they were alike in a lot of ways. Despite being as different as two people could possibly be in terms of upbringing and their expectations of the world around them, they both seemed to respond to difficulties, and each other, in similar ways. It only made sense that she'd likely react the same way he had to what, in its own way, was really a similar kind of loss. Even if Azalie wasn't his real family, she'd been the only family he'd ever had. He'd been too small to remember much of anything about his life before the orphanage, much less what had happened to his family. His parents. He'd been too young to mourn them the way Cleo was bound to. Aside from their similarities in brash, unthinking behaviors, they'd never had a single actual commonality between them. Now, sad as it was, the horrific loss of everything they knew…that was their common ground.

Looking blearily around the room, the pulsing glow of the firelight, the scarlet draperies and wooden shutters, Orphen coughed. Stephanie had warned him against sleep as well, mentioning that if he indeed had a concussion, it wouldn't do for him to go to sleep and never wake up.

It was getting more difficult to resist. The clock face on the wall read that it was 4:48 in the morning, it had been several hours, almost twelve, since he'd struck his head. Hours since everyone had disappeared to their respective assigned quarters, with him in the sitting parlor and Hartia on the library sofa down the hall. The pain in his head had dwindled away, left with a kind of ringing after-presence, like the shaky silence after a thunderous rain. Perhaps it was the painkiller Stephanie had forced on him before she'd left for bed, exhausted by emotion and the continued absence of her husband.

In their own way, everyone was suffering tonight. Stephanie was twisted up in knots over Tim. Bagup, he'd desperately wanted to stay and save the Inn, his home. Where Iris was buried; where they'd lived out most of their lives together. Majic. Majic was just so empathetic, such a nice kid. He was in pain for everyone vicariously, but not without a pinch of some kind of unfamiliar resentment he'd perceived in him from the first time he'd walked into the tavern the day before. Hartia had walked off silently to bed with barely a nod in his direction and enough of a dragging slowness that, even if he wasn't sure what part of the day had sunk into him the most, he was going to bed with a weight on his mind as much as anyone else. Out of everyone, oddly, Orphen supposed he'd come through the day fairly easy, despite that he was likely in the most physical pain. But he hadn't lost anything.

Against his will, he thought of the bright, heavy diamond on Cleo's finger.

The fact it was _that_ which continued to nudge up out of the muck of his thoughts was shameful and embarrassing. But that ring, even despite her supposed refusal, if that didn't embody all of the things he couldn't even come close to giving her, he didn't know what did. To lose something, you had to have it to start off with. With everything falling apart around her, who was going to help her pick up those pieces of her destroyed life?

He couldn't. What he was going to do what would be of any use? Farrior's son could, and would, when they found her. They had to be looking, didn't they? He hadn't heard Cleo's recount of the situation just yet, why they weren't at the manor by the time the mob had arrived. Maybe they'd find the Farriors first. Their plans for tomorrow were watery at best, but short of visiting the dig site, finding the doctor seemed the only route toward any kind of resolution or long-term goal. Hiding in the house for weeks wouldn't get them anywhere but starved half to death and choking on their avoidant fear. Sitting in the house for weeks would make him lose his mind.

Shifting forward on the couch, the shotgun across his lap, he caught his face in his hands, breathing out into his palms. Inhaling slowly, he could still smell his own blood dried into the front of his shirt, the sweaty-metallic smell like a handful of copper five-socket coins. With his eyes closed, he fought to turn off the churning mill of his thoughts, an exercise which detailed entirely at the spine-snapping tension that ramped up at the scraping metal sound of the chain lock on the front door opening.

He was up, running for the door, the shotgun over his shoulder almost before his brain could plot out a course. Dizzy on the opium painkiller, he rounded the corner into the foyer with his heart catching in his throat, arriving in time to see Cleo, in her bare feet and borrowed nightgown walking out into the ankle deep snow.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

To be continued…


	10. Undertow

**X: Undertow**

Once he'd found her on the stairs, dead asleep. Other times: in the velvet seat of a bay window, face down with her arms folded at a table, curled in a porch swing. And more often than he cared to remember, he'd rolled over in bed, still half-immersed in some nonsensical dream, to find her next to him under the sheets. To wake up like that, with a lightning bolt of anxiety and his hands frantic to ensure he was still wearing his clothes, it ruined entire days. Weeks, even. Those times, when she woke, or rather when he woke her up, she'd always been defensive, embarrassed. She'd yell back that she couldn't do anything about it while he snapped at her that her preposterous sleepwalking was bound to land her in an even less friendly place sooner or later.

And now he was charging after her into a viciously cold night, a pitch-black gauntlet littered with voracious horrors that might as well have crawled out right out of whatever nightmare she might have been fleeing from. From the doorstep, he couldn't see her. It was too dark, everything too mired in blowing ice and hanging veils of fog to see beyond a few feet. The only thing he could make out was the snow falling in the immediate distance and the cloud of his own breath hanging around his face. She'd covered a lot of ground in the seconds it had taken him to double back to the sitting room for his cloak.

"Cleo!" In the absolute silence, even speaking at a normal level sounded, felt, like shouting. He just had one of those voices, he guessed. Piercing and sharp, it always seemed to come out louder than he ever intended. But with the way those things—the infected— had turned toward sound, calling after her was foolhardy enough without adding volume when it wouldn't likely make a difference anyway. If there were any in the area they'd come staggering toward the sound of his voice, if they weren't already on their way. They'd be piling around her the way they'd suddenly been all over him, and she wouldn't be able to defend herself. It was a scenario he didn't even want to consider, it made his heart beat so hard it actually hurt. For all the noise it would make, he would be reluctant to use the shotgun unless absolutely necessary. When it came to weapons, at least a blade was silent. He started out, clenching his teeth against the painful chill, moving out further toward the gate.

With his eyes adjusting to the dark, he could see her just past the last fencepost, staring into the street with her head down, walking with that slow, weaving stagger. His quick footsteps sunk into the snow, scattering it around him, slowing him down. There was a long running superstition about waking up sleepwalkers, he'd read it somewhere, something about how the soul leaves the body during sleep-but seeing it as it was bullshit and he didn't have the option in any case, he caught his arms around her and braced himself against the inevitable struggle.

"Cleo!" He snarled, laboring to keep his voice down as much as he could, a hoarse angry whisper into the tangled pile of her hairdo. "Goddamnit! _Goddamnit_! Wake up!"

She thrashed in response, crying out, swinging at him, and he further restricted her movements while she smothered a wordless cry against his neck, bringing up a leg to kick him unsuccessfully. It wasn't long before her resistance weakened, then vanished abruptly as she crossed the line into consciousness with her breathing still quick and panicked, inflating and deflating her lungs inside her willowy frame. She wilted, her arms coming up to brace against him, to push back and look up to orient herself. In the lack of starlight, he could scarcely see her face in the glow of the single, low-burning lantern on the street corner with most of its light blocked by a skeletal oak. Just a vague image with snow on her eyelashes, her eyes wide and blinking, searching for an explanation. "Oh—" she said shakily, her sweet toothpaste breath leaving a tangible fog in the cold dark, her hands clutching his clothes while he was pulling his cloak around her. "Oh!"

"_Oh?_" Breathless from the fight, he snapped at her. "Jesus Christ, Cleo, move it. Walk. _Walk_."

Shepherding her forward, she fumbled through the snow in her bare feet with her breath shaking, her shoulderblades practically vibrating from the cold that had crept up under her nightgown. He hurried her back up the brick steps and back through the door, only pausing to lock it before ushering her into the sitting room, parking her in front of the glowing hearth without further comment on how she could have fallen, broken her goddamned neck or leg and lain there in the snow until she froze to death or worse, just waited for those things out there to find her. Leaving the gun on the coffee table, he said nothing while he retrieved the heavy knit blanket from the sofa and wound it around her, over the wool cloak, pooling it over her nearly blue feet.

She looked small. Slumped and swallowed in Stephanie's matronly white bedgown with her hair still coiled up in a disheveled version of the elaborate updo from days before, she almost seemed like a child trying to look grown up, which was admittedly not the way he'd viewed her for years. He sat down himself to thaw by the fire he'd kept stoked all night to ward off the bone rattling cold and swallowed the tirade taking form on his tongue. There was no real reason to make this any more difficult. He'd have to swallow his anger and let her hear his thoughts about it all some other time when she was less fragile. Difficult as that was going to be.

"I'm so _sorry_…"

"Enough," he told her. "It's over. Just warm up."

"I guess I finally fell asleep," her voice was perceptibly slowed by the dose of laudanum.

"I guess you did," he returned shortly, turning his head to cough into his hand with a violence aggravated by the cold air in his tired lungs. "You're lucky I didn't."

She nodded in slow motion, "Orphen…"

"Shouldn't have taken that damn sedative. Of all fucking places to go...what the _fuck _were you thinking?"

"I wasn't thinking anything. You _know_ that. I'm _sorry_."

"It's fine," he grit out. It was becoming a kind of mantra to ward off what would typically be the blooming of an argument. If she would just stop _apologizing_, he could stop telling her it was all fine when really it wasn't. Nothing was. Not a single goddamn thing was fine.

"It's _not_..."

"It's fine. _You're_ fine, we're all fine. Warm your feet up."

Quietly she complied, lifting her naked feet to the open hearth one at a time, the fabric of her nightdress spilling back from each bare leg while he made a solid point of not looking at her daintily pointed toes, the snow-damp bandage wound tightly around the narrow stalk of her right ankle or the firelight on the curve of her calves. Mercifully, after a few minutes she tucked them back underneath her, cocooning herself in the blanket again and staring for a time into the flames without saying anything. Her stoic face scrubbed clean of the mess of ruined cosmetics and blood, she gazed in unpracticed silence with that miserable pinch between her eyebrows. While he was making that point of not watching her, as though struck with sudden purpose, a hint of her typical petulance returned when she began tugging at the pins in her hair with a kind of languid, weary hostility. She fought to undo each sculpted curl, struggling with her numbed, shaky fingers for long minutes until he finally knocked her hands away in frustrated impatience, moving behind her and reaching up to slip the pins out for her, gently uncoiling each curl with his fingers so she wouldn't rip it all out and drive him insane while she was doing it. By the end, her posture had softened, her eyes looking half-closed from his vantage point. He would have almost taken her for half-asleep if not for the tear that tracked out from her hooded eye.

"Mariabella put my hair up," she offered, unasked, looking down at the neat pile of hair pins he'd created on the floor in front of his knee and prodding them with her fingertip. "The whole time, I was so upset. We argued about something. I said something terrible…"

She was weeping now, losing her voice in the tears but turning away as though if he couldn't see she might save some of her stubborn aristocratic dignity, as if she'd had any to begin with. "How could I...?" She asked, her voice dropped so low, so husky and _odd_ that it tugged at him. Before he could reply, she was reaching over tentatively, the way someone might reach toward an unfriendly cat, and touched her fingertips against where the bandages hid under his blood soiled shirt.

"Does it hurt?" Her voice came out thick, robbed of all of its usual brass. "Your shoulder…I mean."

"Could be worse," he told her warily. "Still healing."

"You're not well."

"I'm alright, Cleo."

"You have a fever."

"No, I don't." He did. Healing with the assistance of sorcery expedited the body's healing process, flooded white blood cells en masse toward the injury, which brought with it swelling, pain, low-grade fever. It was first year shit, totally explainable, he didn't know why he denied it. He'd had the fever for hours now, though all it did was make the cold a little more intolerable and his fuse a little shorter.

"I can tell just by looking at you," she said, then laid the back of her cold hand against his forehead, where his headband usually would have been if he hadn't removed it hours before when it began feeling like a tightening noose around his aching cranium.

"Your hands are too damn cold to tell anything."

"They are not."

He grabbed them, "They're freezing. Anything would feel like it has a fever to you right now."

With a familiar irritable exhale, she came up on her knees and leaned close, pressing her cool, damp cheek against his while he fought the probably impolite urge to squirm away from the onslaught of claustrophobic panic she tended to bring upon him when she closed in on him like this. "This is what my mother used to do," she whispered after a moment, switching sides as though to be sure, pulling one hand free to press the cold palm against the side of his hot throat. "See? You're burning alive."

No kidding. He was also forgetting to breathe. "Okay, fine."

It must have been all the shared proximity of the last day, helping her around, riding those long hours together on horseback, letting her cry and hang onto him like he had. Normally she didn't touch him in such a familiar way. But then, normally they wouldn't be sitting here together at all, but crisis had a way of forging truces and alliances where there was usually a long, ongoing war. But truce or not, she was far too close for his personal sense of comfort, however skewed that might be.

"You should've taken something for it," she told him, drawing back a little but not enough to drain away his anxiety.

"Sure, that would've been great. So I could be knocked out when you tromped out in the goddamn snow in your sleep."

"No one asked you to come after me," she said, sounding more like herself than he'd heard all day. Finally she let go of him and backed up so he could breathe again.

"Yeah, no one ever asks me. Who the hell else is going to? Your fiancé, I suppose. What's his stupid name again?"

"_That_ is uncalled for," she hissed, the ghost of her recent tears evaporating from the growing heat in her voice. It got his heart beating quicker. It always did.

"Is it? So it's okay for you to nearly kill me so long as I shut up about that?" In hindsight, shutting up about that was actually a grand idea.

"I keep telling you how sorry I am. _I'm sorry_. Obviously I shouldn't believe you when you tell me how it's fine and you understand. Next time just let me take care of myself, then."

"That would have turned out well, I'm sure. Would you have preferred us finding you frozen to death or being eaten? Maybe _both_?"

"Doesn't sound like you'd give a damn either way."

"Oh. Of course not. I just go running after you every time you're in trouble for my fucking health, since you can see how beneficial it is to my longevity."

"Why do you, then?"

"Wha—what the hell would you expect me to do? What do you think I am?"

"I _never_ know what to expect _you_ to do. One second you're insisting it's all _fine_ and then you're yelling at me. How the hell should I know?"

"I'm not yelling at you," he insisted. "You're being an idiot. No one _asked_ me to come after you? Good fucking god. You were thanking me for it yesterday."

"Well, now I'm extremely sorry for that."

"Yeah, you would be, wouldn't you? Engaged woman that you are."

"I'm not an-!" she hissed, struggling to her feet in front of the fire, averting her face. "Why do you keep bringing that up?"

"How am I supposed to forget it with you hanging all over me and flashing that goddamn rock in my face?" Honestly, he could never have said why he couldn't just shut the hell up.

She rose up in front of him, catching the mantel over the fireplace to balance her weight off her bad ankle. She was bending forward with her weight on her hands, the bright firelight pouring through the gauzy, borrowed nightdress, projecting the contours of her body beneath like a shadow play, each long limb, the curve of her hip and valley of her waist, an obliviously teasing silhouette backlit by the burning fire, which seemed only appropriate when compared with how seeing it made him feel. The illusion of her as a child, swallowed by the billowing bedgown burned away with the flames roaring behind her.

If he'd believed in Gods, he would have silently asked for help.

With her standing there, Orphen wasn't sure there had ever been a moment in his life that carried through with such clarity, perfect lucidity, even through the fatigue and the opium-tincture. A moment where, with everything he wanted revealed to him in a display of light and shadow, several things were more plain than they may have ever been.

Mostly, that he was a horrible person. That he was incapable of thinking something pleasant or caring about her without closely following that thought with something that made him disgusted with himself.

And that he was so, so completely fucked.

His idea that things would get easier the longer he ignored his unwelcome feelings, that they would eventually fade without his encouragement like someone forgetting to water a plant or feed a pet…they were absurd. For no reason, he remembered standing in a field of cornflowers at dusk, maybe a year—year and a half before. He'd been standing in a field of cornflowers somewhere between Eugenia and Essex with the remaining light going cobalt before turning into darkness, not doing much of anything except thinking and enjoying the silence before she'd surprised him. She'd come up from behind, snuck up from the campsite near the river and touched him on the shoulder, just softly, and he'd startled like a skittish horse, ducking as though attacked, and following that in the chilly blue twilight with the shadowed trees and the clear sky, he wasn't sure if his heart was drumming in that quick, peculiar rhythm because she'd shocked him or because of how she was smiling and laughing with an almost musical sound. At the time, he'd had to tense his muscles, hold his breath, actually clench his fists. Anything to stop himself from acting out, putting his hands on her and catching that bell-like giggle in his mouth to see if it tasted as sweet as it sounded.

He'd snapped something unpleasant at her, his usual defense mechanism, and she'd stopped laughing. But later at night after the fire had dwindled to a ruby glow, he'd found himself thinking about it, skin flushed warm from the memory of it while she and Majic slept nearby, going back to the field of cornflowers in his mind and undressing her in the stomped down crabgrass, tasting the skin in the hollow at the base of her throat and the music of her bubbling laughter dwindling under the weight of his mouth and hands and hips. Sexualizing something innocent as he was constantly wont to do.

No. What he'd suffered through already was nothing compared with what was coming.

Embarrassingly, he couldn't even look away and spare himself. He almost choked on his own tongue. As someone had once told him, and as he'd deciphered months before, the fact that he felt guilty about any of it was the first differentiation between typical lust and other, more complicated, idiotic feelings. It just so happened that, perhaps inconveniently, the two often worked in tandem. They were right now. And maybe, that day long ago in the field of cornflowers, they had been then as well. He wasn't sure when he'd noticed that feeling eating a hole through him, if there had been a specific moment.

She turned, looked at him still sitting on the floor with back against the sofa, knees steepled up almost as though he'd fallen there. "Does it bother you?"

"Does _what_ bother me?" He was, decidedly, bothered.

"The ring. It bothers you."

She didn't seem to notice how he was gaping at her, which was merciful at best. She was more focused on the stupid words he'd let roll off out of his stupid, exhausted, drugged up stupid mouth. "Go back to bed, Cleo."

"_Nice_. Maybe I should take some more of that laudanum so maybe I'll sleepwalk and end up outside again? I'm sure you'd like that, to shove that in my face like I _can help it_."

"You mean so I can go running out after you again? Maybe you just won't be satisfied until you've gotten me killed too, huh?"

She said nothing, her gaze dropping to the ground with the weight of a falling stone, looking for all the world like he'd hauled back and kicked her in stomach. And by all accounts, he had. Why he'd even let _any of that_ come out of his mouth, he couldn't explain. His brain wasn't right. In the name of her safety, he'd been almost burned to death, half-suffocated, stabbed, bled out, cracked in the head, almost eaten alive, had run out in the frigid darkness crawling with the walking infectious dead and told that no one had asked him to do any of it. For fuck's sake, no one had to _ask_ him. He'd meant she wouldn't be happy until he'd been killed in addition to all of that.

No. No, he didn't mean that either.

He'd given more than he had to give the last day or so, and he hadn't slept for any of that time. Now, really all he wanted was to curl up somewhere dark and warm and sleep for a couple years because he was losing her no matter how much he did, and she had no idea how it felt. No idea how that was ripping him apart, or how his laughable, pathetic _attachment _to her were slowly destroying him, like wind erosion on mountains or water cutting a path through limestone. Little by little, over the last few days, that buried feeling had started to throb, ache uncontrollably like an overworked, sore muscle. That long denied, ugly secret was scratching at the door, wanting out. Wanting _her_.

That's what he'd _meant_. And he wanted to _shout it_ at her.

Which, probably, would have been the better thing to say. Except maybe the last part. He had a bad habit of speaking without thinking first. Childman had admonished him a hundred times for his lack of planning, and running in blind was never an acceptable battle strategy. But even now, without even a moment's worth of strategizing or planning what to say, it all wanted to come out, to erupt volcanically out from behind his gritting teeth: the awful hidden truth_. _Choking it back was like trying to swallow a mouthful of thorns. He brought a hand to his own head.

"Fuck. I didn't mean that…Not the way it sounded. Not at all."

Hugging herself, she moved away from the fire, the projection of her bare body under the loose gown vanishing, returning to him a fraction of his dwindling focus. "I know what you meant," she spat, the sound of impending tears snagging the smooth fabric of her voice once more.

"No, you don't. Really. You don't have any idea. Listen...I'm sorry. Just…" He pressed the heel of one hand against a closed eye. He'd gotten himself into this situation, him and his opium lubricated tongue. When was he going to learn when to just shut up?

She didn't reply. She was crying again, turned from him with her shoulders jerking and her face buried in her hands, wobbling away on her sprained ankle and faltering. How she'd gotten that far out in the dark outside could only be that she hadn't noticed the pain while in her fitful, walking sleep. She half-crumpled on the wooden floor and was already struggling up when he came up behind her, reaching down to pull her to her feet and she swung at him listlessly, her voice grinding out through tears with a sound like nails ripping out of wood. "I can stand on my own!"

He towed her up and she struggled, pushing him away with her face hidden by the curls he'd released from their captivity on her head. "Stop it. You know you didn't get anyone killed. What happened had nothing to do with you, you know that!"

"You seem to have a pretty _fucking_ good idea of what I know and what I have no idea about, so you tell me!" She outright screamed at him in the ringing, early morning silence; a sound so shockingly loud it shook him more violently than a peal of sudden thunder. The fury on her face was underlined by the ever present misery that had been there every moment since he'd pulled her out of that cupboard in the burning house; a kind of dumb and mindless anguish, like the pain had gone on long enough that she was used to it, but it still hurt.

"What _did_ it have to do with?" she wailed; her eyes had gone soft-focus like she was looking at something far away. "You _tell me_! Tell me why the last conversation I'll ever have with my mother was a horrible fight where I told her I hated her! Why is it that the last thing I'll ever say to my only sister is the worst possible thing I could think to say? What's _wrong_ with me?"

He stood frozen as stone while she looked at him wildly, her hands practically fisted in her own hair. She let out a high sob, her shoulders rounding, her eyes squeezing shut.

She went limp under the burden of her admission, her dead weight pulling her back to her knees and he sank down beside her. She was no longer protesting his proximity, only curled into her knees and moaning; wracking, keening sobs that shook her whole body . It was the second time he'd voluntarily put his arms around her in the space of twenty minutes, which was definitely some kind of record. Not that he was keeping records. She seemed to set off a reflex when she drooped forward like that, hunching against the onslaught of misery that would temporarily strip her of any kind of reason or control. When she hunched forward, her hands folded tightly together in her lap, he just reacted by reaching for her on some kind of buried, nurturing impulse. To her credit, she didn't say anything about it or resist further as he might have expected, only buried herself against him and shook, cried like she was breaking apart. No matter if he held her or not, how gentle or awkwardly he smoothed her hair back from her wet face, her weeping only receded when the impulse was spent, and with her sobbing like that, one minute of it felt like a decade. When it did eventually lessen she held fast to him, puffing breath against his collarbone, trembling in the wake of the storm and breathlessly waiting for it to lash back like circling flood tide.

And there she stayed on the floor, collapsed forward into his tense, tongue-tied embrace. What he was supposed to say now, supposed to do, he couldn't have had any less of an idea. He sat, arms where they seemed required while she lay against him, exhausted by her grief, her breath ragged with tears. She'd barely spoken a word since he'd found her in the manor house, and now this. There was no way the entire house wasn't awake now, listening intently to the silence that followed her outrage.

Having had the unconventional upbringing that he'd had, his instincts in this arena provided little help. When he'd been hurt, afraid…he'd been told to be strong. To be a man. Azalie would wrinkle her nose unsympathetically and remind him that he was a boy. When he'd been inundated by cruel grief following her accident, in the days afterward, before the mock funeral that had prompted his enraged departure…there had been no one. No one he'd even trusted enough anymore to speak to, much less fall apart and scream and sob the way he'd really wanted. The way Cleo was doing now.

He wasn't going to tell her to be strong. He knew that much. She didn't need to hear it any more than he had needed to when everything he'd valued and relied on was suddenly ripped away.

Carefully, with his arms, he gave her a gentle squeeze and she fiercely mimicked the action, as though afraid she was slipping loose. The world was an ocean; he was a raft. A tiny flutter of hitching breath bubbling up out of her while she settled herself, her face tilted up on his good shoulder, gleaming and damp in the amber firelight. Her eyelashes bristled together, spiked wet with tears when she glanced up briefly, maybe expecting a brusque commentary on her thunderclap of hysteria. It made his chest tight, like his blood was too thick for his heart to pump easily.

If things had been different, he would have been there to help her. Been there to save her, save her family, spare her this agony. At the very least, if he hadn't been so soft, so bendable to her requests, he could have gotten her out of the house before it had happened. If that would have been better, it all happening in her absence…well, that was debatable. At least then she could be angry with him for removing her, instead of something abstract.

It would be better because she wouldn't have seen it, her home decimated and invaded. The loss of her sister, whether she'd seen the actual mess that was left of her or not. Bile tickled at the back of his throat just touching the memory with his reaching, anxious, upheaved mind. She vibrated with a wave of remnant tears, the aftershocks from her crying jag once again threatening to overtake her tiny, delicate frame. Funny. He'd never really thought of her as delicate until now. But looking down at her face in the firelight…she was. She was delicate. Small-boned and dainty, blonde as a bottle of sunlight with feathery eyelashes and wide, angry eyes the color of water. She had a perilous kind of allure that dragged a man in like an undertow; it irritated a primitive, nervous urge to either murder or make love, and in his case probably both. But it was easier to think of her that way when she wasn't running her mouth at him, spitting fire: her own kind of siren song. He took a deep breath to focus himself.

"It's easy to say things we don't mean," he smoothed her hair back in his own clumsy attempt at gentility; not one of his strongest qualities by a long shot. "I do it all the goddamn time. It doesn't mean, you know, like they forgot what was important. You know, like that you loved them…or…"

"I'm not at all sure they knew that," she breathed. "I don't know if I ever said it. I certainly didn't act like it. Now I'll never see them…not ever…"

"You don't have to say it to mean it. Or for them to know it, either." Or so he'd heard. He wasn't sure he wanted that to be the truth or not.

"It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense that this happened."

"Come on. Does anything make sense? The only things that make any sense are things we're used to. Things we expect, right? All of this that's happening, everything that's already happened to you…to me, even. It's not going to make sense." He mechanically ran a hand down her back, his palm tracing down the curve of her spine before stopping.

She shifted, sitting on the floor in his arms, exhaling shakily without reply, only a high whine that, even without seeing her, he could interpret as an attempt to swallow another onslaught of tears. His peculiar sympathy-reflex itched again, moving him like a puppet without thinking and turning his head to kiss her lightly on the temple. If she was put off by it, she didn't say anything, only grew very quiet and still, settling into him and after a moment, seeming to have calmed substantially.

"I don't want to feel this way anymore," she whimpered, her cool breath against the fevered curve of his throat, the damp brush of her lips there. He swallowed convulsively against the noose of new anxiety tightening around his neck.

"What way?"

"I don't know. Helpless." Her voice faltered, fighting the impulse to break down again. He understood the feeling too well. He felt that way _right now_. "What am I supposed to _do_?"

"No idea," he told her. Being honest for once. "But…hey, we always think of something…don't we? We'll...figure something out. Things'll be okay."

She turned her head, leaning her head on his shoulder again, glancing up to see his face not without embarrassment. "How?"

"I don't know. But they will. Will you trust me on that?"

She gave a vague nod. Instead of saying anything further-which rarely seemed to go well where Cleo was concerned-he turned and cautiously repeated the temple-kiss that had quieted her before, missing this time and catching the top of her cheekbone, just under the outside corner of her eye. Slow and deliberate, but he hadn't meant to linger, though he must have; it felt like he did. It only took a quick upward tilt of her head before she was much, much too close.

With her glassy, out-of-focus eyes and her tiny voice, she whispered at him. "I don't think I'll ever figure you out."

"Why would you want to do that?" He would have laughed but couldn't, and he was too worn out and startled and hopelessly transfixed by her warm breath and the flick of her wet eyelashes to do anything rational or quickly enough to save himself from what was going to happen at the most excellently wrong time.

Only a vague, half-coherent protest sounded, shouted from a distant mountaintop in his reptile brain: Don't.

_Don't!_

And honestly, he couldn't be sure if he had; if the dry, hesitant press of their mouths had been born of his own doing or hers; if he'd dropped his head or she'd leaned forward. He hadn't intended it, but suddenly as anything, it was happening. Cautiously, one timid kiss followed another in close succession until everything dropped into heart-pounding, tongue-sliding, open-mouthed slow motion, all with clutching hands like nervous birds uncertain where it was safe to land.

When she pulled away suddenly, inevitably, he apologized and swore all in the same rush of escaping, guilty breath. Even though, really, he wasn't sure if he was for sure to blame for it.

Though, since she was so plainly not herself, he was responsible by default. He felt every ounce of that weight dropping on him looking at the perplexed, blinking gaze she avoided looking at him with. Her shining mouth looking wet and a little swollen when she came up on her knees in her nightdress, she used her palms to wipe the clinging hair away from her damp face. Enigmatically, she didn't do what he entirely expected: she didn't leave. Didn't jump up and storm back upstairs. Instead, she just sat back down on the floor slowly, and after a long, uncomfortable minute that lasted a year, she half-turned to him, her avoidant eyes on the happy fire while he made tense, anxious fists against the floor, gripped with an agonizing arousal after just one accidental kiss that couldn't have lasted more than twenty seconds.

Pathetic.

He closed his eyes, breathing in as slowly as he could manage when his body wanted more breath than it seemed to know what to do with. When he opened them again, she was looking right at him, thinking about it. Replaying it in the theatre of her memory the same way he was helplessly doing over and over, unable to stand for all the blood rushing around agitated in his body, his tongue numb with the taste of her, everything pulled under and flailing in the undertow of Hurricane Cleo.

Really. He should have known better than to get so close. To follow her outside. To let her breathe on him. To undo her hair. To get involved, as though he could really avoid it. Especially right now, with her so unstable and him so increasingly sensitive to her and her pain. People said things, did things on a kind of wild, unthinking impulse in times of this kind of extreme emotional stress. He'd told her that himself. It was the same feral desire that was now howling wickedly in his bloodsteam, goading him to push her onto her back and let his hands drink in the topography of that forbidden territory she'd unknowingly taunted him with when she'd stepped in front of the fire.

It was better to stay away. It was essential to stay away. Because obviously, _obviously_, he couldn't be trusted. Not when he wasn't in full control of himself like this. Not with her frail and volatile and wholly oblivious in regards to any concept of personal space. Not maybe ever.

"I'm…tired," she forced out, flicking a glance up at him before looking away again. It was as good an excuse as any to get the conversation moving, to get them past this moment with them both paralyzed on the floor.

"Let's get you back to bed."

He had already started to stand when she turned a blatantly panicked look on him, her fingers tightening around fistfuls of his shirt.

"Nuh—I. I don't want to be up there anymore…I…can't sleep in there. All by myself. I keep…thinking…"

"Okay, okay. Sleep on the sofa. Alright?"

Her voice, dry and rattling as the wind outside, came out small. "With you?"

He must have hesitated, because she spoke again while he was thinking with his slow brain. She said, "Please?"

"If that...makes you feel better," he heard himself tell her thickly, permission that was utterly against his own judgment.

She was sluggish, her eyes glossed over from her fatigue or the laudanum, maybe. Perhaps that was the missing piece in her erratic mood swings, with her screaming at him one minute then sobbing; spitting venom then kissing him with her lips sweet and slow like honey. Or it could just be that her mental state had been a time bomb waiting to erupt. It could be that it still was.

As he was helping her over to the sofa apprehensively, allowing her to crowd up against him, there was a sense of impending doom. And not the usual, comfortable kind of doom he was accustomed to, when an argument was looming. Easing down onto the cushions with her, the air felt thick, charged up like the summer air after an electrical storm.

Cleo with her cold hands and her knees tucked up under her, she was leaning into him like a possessive housecat, pulling a blanket around them both and he wasn't thinking about it. Not any of it. Tilting his head back on the armrest, Orphen closed his eyes, bowled over by fatigue and humming with muscle cramping anxiety while they lay in a long, frightening silence. When he opened his eyes again, the clock read ten 'til six but the glow around the closed plantation shutters barely registered daylight. Out there it was gray and morgue-cold, but on the sofa, for the first time in what felt like months, he was warm, surrounded by the fragrant halo of her uncoiled hair and an almost dizzy sense of misplaced euphoria.

He couldn't think straight at all.

He should have been thinking about what that kid and the crowd in the doorway of the Lin Tavern had said about the Doctor and the treatment being worthless, the antibody that cost three thousand sockets a vial. Some perverse part of him wanted to know what Cleo thought of that estimation and what she'd have to say in defense of the good doctor and particularly of his family. He should have been thinking about where they would head next or if it was safe to visit Bazilkok, what they would do if Bagup got sicker or Tim never returned. What Majic would do if they had to shoot his father. If Hartia was still pissed off about the blood hex. Who Cleo was going to contact first to make sure they knew she was still alive. If they'd ever find Doctor Farrior. If it was even possible for this disease to be the Gris Cygnus.

What he was going to do now to ensure some measure of safety or even hope when he'd never felt more powerless in his life.

But really, despite everything that he should by all means have been contemplating…all he could think about was that in a thousand years, for all the times he'd contemplated doing it—just kissing her—he'd have never thought it would've happened like it just had. Or that afterward, they would operate on an embarrassed silence as though it hadn't occurred at all. He'd spent the better part of the last three years tamping down every impulse imaginable when it came to Cleo. That at such a crucial time he could let one slip through was embarrassing, but it was even worse how intensely wonderful he'd felt about it at the time. And maybe still did, with the pleasant weight of her body curled up against him, he could almost close his eyes and imagine that this was where she belonged. As much as she would deny requiring any sort of protector, he had long fulfilled the role with little thanks because of that long-denied, ugly secret of his. Because he loved her. Loved her as much as he likely could love anybody.

Laying with her, he found himself breathless with it; crushed under its weight. He found his fingers fascinated with the feel of her hair and the warm rush of breath seeping through his shirt while he carefully gathered her near enough to close his arms around her. Even with the now-familiar sense of frightened dread hanging in the background, there was comfort in it. Even a delirious glimpse of what felt like gorgeous, stolen happiness.

Because with what felt like the world crumbling apart around them, she was safe, and she was here. With him.

The silky hush of her voice surprised him, speaking up from the silence he'd mistaken for sleep. "Your heart is beating so fast."

He pulled in a breath, the golden crown of her head so close it was an inhalation of her: a smell of lavender shampoo and musky smoke from the fire, salty tears and warm skin.

"Yeah," he told her softly. "I know."


	11. Always Something Else

**XI: Always Something Else**

Hartia found him at the kitchen table a little more than an hour after the screaming in the living room had dwindled into a peculiar silence. He was sitting bowed over with a cup of coffee, leaning on his hand and barely throwing his old friend a glance when he swept into the room and pulled out a chair, fluidly seating himself at the table with enough pointed, silent purpose that his posture seemed to sink even lower. Hartia's early-morning, freshly-showered chipper kind of enthusiasm tended to put his ill-tempered companion palpably on edge, which wasn't a huge feat when one considered how much time he spent on that particular edge on a daily basis. It served as its own kind of entertainment.

"Rough night, huh?"

Not lifting his eyes from the tabletop, Orphen sighed keenly, but didn't reply.

"I figured as much. How's the shoulder?"

"How do you think?"

"Just thought I'd ask," he said, eyeing the steaming cup and craning over his shoulder to check if the percolator was still on the stove. "You made a whole pot?"

"Is it possible to make less?"

Hartia shrugged, climbing up to prepare himself a cup. "Is there cream in the ice box?"

"How would I know?"

"You don't take cream?"

"Do I look like somebody who takes cream?"

"I doubt you'll like my answer."

"Then this is probably a fantastic time to keep it the fuck to yourself."

"At least you didn't answer me with another question," Hartia reseated himself at the table with his steaming coffee. "You drink it black?"

"Only way to have it."

"Disgusting."

Orphen shielded his almost-smile from view, drinking the black coffee quietly while Hartia shifted topics smoothly over the rim of his cream-loaded cup, in the best, most direct way he knew how. "I heard her yelling."

For his part, Orphen seemed aggravated as he ever did about anything, but fairly tamed by the exhaustion that shaded dark rings under his eyes. He didn't bother with swiping the hair out of his face, perhaps hoping it would hide the fact he responded to the comment by developing the expression of a child being asked if he'd stolen a chocolate. "I don't doubt it."

He gave him a smirk. "Where is she now?"

"Still asleep on the sofa. You passed her on your way in."

"Oh," Hartia glanced back at the swinging kitchen door briefly, forgetting he'd see nothing. "How'd you manage that one?"

"Who knows. She didn't want to go back upstairs. She's…" After a moment of thought, he took another slow drink. "… a little sensitive. I should have kept my mouth shut. Don't know what I was thinking, acting like everything was normal."

"What'd you say?"

"I don't remember. I'm not sure it was anything."

"Bullshit."

"Give me a break. She was sleepwalking. I was on the couch, drifting off a little but...I heard the door open."

"She went _outside_?"

"Yeah, lucky me, Sir Fucking Galahad again. Unbelievable. I brought her back inside. We talked a little. Things went downhill, the way they normally do. She got testy…and then she…just lost it. Really, just completely lost it. I'm sure that's what you heard." He blinked a few times, as though still shocked by it. He shook his head a little, turning his eyes back down into his cup. "Never seen her act like that before."

"I would have come out, but, things got quiet again pretty fast. So..."

"Whatever the fuck that's supposed to imply."

"Easy, tough guy. Did you know that you could use a shave? And a change of clothes wouldn't hurt." Hartia gestured to the blood stiffened jacket and once-gray shirt that was starting its third day of use. "That's a little macabre, even for you."

"What? It's _my_ goddamn blood." Still in his distinctly defensive posture, he barely glanced down at the mess. He'd always been oblivious of things like that anyway; of himself. Even walking the halls of the Tower nearly ten years before, he would breeze by the girls tripping on themselves just to catch his eye, which could not, of course, have been less interested either way. He had been in Azalie's strange thrall since as long as he'd known him, but despite that, every school girl he could remember had suffered a visibly painful crush on Krylancelo Finrandi while Hartia had towered in his skinny, redheaded awkwardness: a foot taller, ten pounds lighter and light years behind in skill. Not that he was bitter. It was just that nobody could have blamed Cleo for getting caught in that spiderweb. But as usual, Krylancelo's willful ignorance endured.

"And you're wearing this the whole time she's talking to you, huh? Very soothing, I'm sure." Hartia squinted at him. "Is that my jacket?"

"I don't know, is it? I'm not trying to win your vote, here." His expression, however, acknowledged possible validity on both points.

"You _have_ my vote, stupid. I just wonder if you didn't work so hard at being as disagreeable as possible, things wouldn't be a little more civil between you two. Aren't you both getting a little old for this routine? And especially now, when she _needs_ y—"

"We are not having this conversation."

With a hard sigh, Hartia drained his cup then stood and drifted purposefully back toward the stove to pour another. When he returned, stirring the cream into the dark cauldron of his cup, he casually planted himself back down in front of Orphen, who was staring into the empty fireplace beside the table. "Do you remember in the Inn the other day, I said Azalie was right about you?"

"No? Right about what?"

"Sometimes you're so damn predictable. That's the same thing you said then. Really, what a surprise, you don't remember. We were talking about this same thing. In Totokanta. You were about two and a half sheets to the wind?"

"…Oh…right. Alcohol makes me a little forgetful."

"It also makes you incredibly mean."

He ignored that smoothly. "And Azalie was right about me how?"

"That you're determined to be unhappy because it justifies you dragging around like a gloomy bastard and not coming back to the Tower, and she's right. You are. And you do. You take everything to the most negative extreme you can. It's exhausting."

"Azalie said that, huh? Not sure how in the hell she thinks she should know."

"Come on. Just for this once, listen to me. Anybody with eyes can see you're tearing yourself up over that girl. You're going to get yourself in more trouble than you can handle if you keep this up."

"I don't even know what that means."

"No?" He went for a drink of brew, glancing out the opened kitchen shutters where the gray daylight reflected off the deep trough of snow. "You really think I'd hear all that screaming when I was just down the hall? You don't think I got up to see what the hell was going on?"

"Which means…what, exactly?"

"How'd you quiet her down?"

Orphen leaned on his elbows, his eyes trained on the table top while he almost seemed to shrink. "Well—"

"You don't have to answer. I know what happened, Krylancelo, I made it to the doorway while she was crying herself into submission and figured you had the situation under control. I've never heard you talk that way to anybody."

With some measure of satisfaction, Hartia watched an intensely uncomfortable bearing grip his petulant comrade, like he would for all the world attempt to break his own neck the way some say rabbits can, if only to get away. Like an animal that chews off its own leg to get out of a snapping steel trap. With an embarrassed silence that said almost everything he wouldn't, he stared into his coffee for a long while before forcing himself to speak. "We should really be focusing on more important things right now."

"God," Hartia snapped. "You're impossible. What in the happy hell could be more important?"

"I can't talk about this..."

"Can't or won't?"

"Either?"

"Ah!" Hartia smiled, raising his cup to him as a salute. "Progress!"

"Where? In fucking opposite-land? What's wrong with you?"

"It's just friendly concern, is all. It's increasingly painful to watch. And after that development-"

"To watch what?" He'd made an attempt at sounding intimidating and had only succeeded in sounding oddly empty.

"Whatever the hell it is you're doing. It's becoming uncomfortable to even be in the same room with you two, it's hard to breathe. Even before we came to work with Stephanie. In fact, especially before. Now, with everything that's happened, I admit it. I'm worried about you. Come on, I've seen you go off the deep end over less than all of this."

"Well, don't be. I'm fine. And she'll be…"

"No, Krylancelo. I'm not letting you go off on that tangent, thank you. You're not fine, and let's face it, you shouldn't be. Nor should any damn one of us. But especially Cleo. She's not fine. You can't expect her to be fine. And out of everybody here—no…" Hartia shook his head, furrowing his eyebrows. "No. Out of anybody she could possibly _want_…"

"Jesus," he grunted, rubbing his forehead restlessly. "I know she's not fine, alright? I'm trying, alright? You don't think this has been hard enough?"

"For who? Don't you know how much that girl loves you?"

Orphen couldn't have looked less stricken if he'd physically recoiled. "Don't say that."

"Why? Does it hurt a little? Hearing that?"

With his head down, Orphen's voice came out dry and rough. "Are you enjoying this?"

"Contrary to your concept of things, I don't enjoy other people's discomfort."

"Now it's my turn to call bullshit…"

"That girl loves you. You've never been any good at noticing that kind of thing, I guess, but let's not pretend you're quite that stupid. She's lost her whole life and at least two of the most important people in it. I shouldn't even have to get into this. With everything that's happening here, she needs you."

"Listen. If you know what happened…"

"Yes. I know what happened. And I know how you fell all over the place to get away afterward."

"_God_." Hearing it spoken of aloud seemed to change him immediately. His hand gripped at the hair on the back of his head, his voice breaking on its way out when he finally spoke. "I'm so fucked. What was I thinking?"

"Were you thinking? That's always your damn problem, thinking too much. Not thinking about it is probably the first right thing you've done maybe ever."

"No. No, that's…"

"Look at you, you're a wreck."

"I haven't slept in two days. At least two days."

"You could be sleeping now. You could have slept on the couch."

"You've got to be kidding me." He took a rattling breath. "You don't know what this is like. The last thing I need to hear is your take on things."

"Seems like you need to hear anybody else's take other than yours. You'll go into a burning fucking hellhole to save her but you can't just tell her why that might be?"

"…wouldn't you have?" He said it so weakly, if Hartia had been so inclined or cruel enough, he would have laughed.

"I did, remember? Or did the alcohol make you forget that too?"

Orphen shook his head with what looked like abject misery. He didn't answer.

"You're missing the point entirely. I mean you've accomplished far more difficult things just yesterday—"

"Stop it. I can't, alright?"

"Can't or won't?"

"Goddamn it," he sighed, leaning on his hand. "Either. Pick one."

"Okay, then tell _me_."

This earned a perfectly blank and almost comical look. Like a dog cocking its head. "What?"

"Explain it to me. I don't know either. I'm just taking shots in the dark because that's all I get with you. Hell. That's all I've ever gotten with you. Tell me what it is you can't tell her."

Honestly, he'd expected a final 'fuck off' and maybe a half-cup of cooling black coffee in his face. But oddly enough, with one hand fisted in the hair that normally fell over his forehead and his creased brow resting on the heel of that hand, he actually appeared to be considering it. "She…" he said, then seemed to blank at what came next.

Hartia reached back to tug the tie out of his bound, shower-damp hair to alleviate a building pressure in his head. He didn't prompt him. It would be like poking a stick at a frightened, trapped animal. He was struggling enough on his own without help. Finally, he got out a sentence, just under his breath.

"I guess…she makes me wish…that things were different."

"What's that mean?"

"It means what it means. The way things are…come on, you're not fucking stupid, Hartia. You know who she is. Where she comes from, all of that. And you know me. You probably know me better than anybody else does, so you should see it pretty plainly. Those things don't mix. I can't even talk to her for ten minutes without…"

"Without what?"

He tried to avert his face, his discomfort having reached an entirely new frontier. He didn't finish the thought. "I couldn't…we couldn't be anything. The whole thing is pointless. _Asinine_. It would be a huge disaster. No matter how much…"

Hartia waited for him to finish for a long moment, but when he didn't, he prodded him verbally. "Since when do you give a crap about all that? Society and all that? That is what you mean, isn't it?"

"I couldn't care less. But whether she wants to or not, she can't help it. Those people, it's just burned into them. It's just part of how she thinks."

"You're truly deluded. Take a look at what's right in front of you. You think she cares so much about it that she's been following you around like a baby duck for the past three bloody years like it's some kind of whacko rich people sport?"

Orphen shrugged in dubious agreement. "She's intent on doing exactly what she's been forbidden to do. It's like a challenge to her. I haven't given in so far, so…"

"You're serious? You think she's hung on this long because she wants to sleep with you?"

He shrugged again.

"You're thinking of her like she's a man."

"No," Orphen forced out a wheezing imitation of a laugh. "I'm definitely not."

"I mean that women don't think that way. You know that, come on. If it was just sex, she could've gotten that anywhere she wanted."

From the look on his face, it wasn't as though the thought hadn't occurred to him before. But he clearly didn't welcome the idea in any case. "That's not what I meant, but it's better than what you said."

"That she loves you?"

He shifted uncomfortably just hearing it. "Stop it," he said again, and meant it.

"Or is it better to think that for your own sake?"

"No."

"No what? No, it's not better or no-"

"No," he said. "It doesn't change anything. It doesn't help. Nothing helps, alright?"

Hartia blinked. Absorbed that statement for what it was, and tried his best not to smirk at the sheer hypocrisy of it. "Doesn't it seem to you that if the high society was a big deal to her, she wouldn't have stuck around this long?"

"Listen. It's not society that concerns me. It doesn't matter…"

"Kr—"

"It doesn't _matter_! What? You're going to convince me she's going to want to stick around forever, starving on the streets, fighting for our lives every day just for the sport of it? Who would want that? Why would she want to stay?"

"And the answer you came up with is that a woman would go through all of that just to have sex with you? Jesus Christ, you're arrogant. Did you know that? How arrogant that is?"

"You don't think I fucking know that? Goddamn. No. Okay? No, I don't understand why she stays. Or why she does anything. I don't know. If she…felt that way…I would understand that even less. I haven't given her any damn reason to. All I can think it's that it's been like some kind of reverse vacation for a bored rich girl, and it was okay because she could go back whenever she wanted. You know? Back to her…bubble baths and marble floors and…those stupid throw pillows with tassels…and, you know what I mean."

Hartia nodded. He finished his cup of coffee silently and stared into the cup. "And now she can't go back. Now she has nowhere else to go. You must feel like you at least have that in common, even though you know the Tower would have you back in a blink. Do you ever ask yourself why _you_ want to go around forever starving in the streets, fighting for your life?"

"She still can have whatever she wants," he leaned back in his chair, flicking a glance at the kitchen door as though he expected it to swing open. "She still has that ring on."

"What? Lord. Azalie really was right about you."

"No, she wasn't."

"So if things were different, like you say." Hartia scrubbed a hand through his damp hair, scattering it around. "If you could give her everything she's used to and could ever want. You'd do what? Tell her what? You didn't end up telling _me_ anything except a bunch of crazy."

His tired, shaken expression was so raw that, for the first time in years, Hartia was really looking at Krylancelo, not this mask he called Orphen. It was the same expression he'd given him the day of Azalie's "funeral": raw and exposed, exhausted and confused and bordering on betrayed. Strangely, he thought all those girls back at the Tower, the shy, admiring gazes that had slowly turned to lovelorn pain the more his friend had failed to notice them. In its own way, this castigation he was putting himself through must have been some kind of divine punishment to compensate for all of the heartache he had caused in his youth. He held that accusing, honest look on him a moment and it told him that everything he'd said was right.

That if all those things were different. If the whole world was something else and he was a different person, he would tell Cleo Everlasting that he loved her, as it was so painfully obvious he did.

"Liar," Hartia chuckled, it came out tasting as bitter as black coffee and years of envious resentment he hadn't really known he'd held onto. "No you wouldn't. You'd find some other reason to complicate everything. It's always something else."

Orphen blinked at that, his eyes looking far away for a long moment before he dropped his face into his hands and exhaled a long breath, deflating his lungs entirely perhaps to avoid lunging across the table for Hartia's throat.

"And what do you intend to do now? She won't sleep forever."

"She seemed happy enough not to discuss it earlier."

Now Hartia did laugh. "Who do you think you're talking about? Since when does Cleo let anything slide?"

His face was still hidden. "…since never. But I might be granted an extension for awhile. She only let it slide at the time because she didn't know what the hell to say. She was flying high on laudanum the whole time, if I'm lucky she won't remember anything."

"So what, you can pretend nothing happened? You chode. You really think that'll happen? She's going to remember. You'd better figure this shit out because it's distracting the hell out of you, and you almost got yourself killed a couple times yesterday because of it."

"You think you know so goddamned much."

"Tell me I'm wrong."

"You're wrong," he returned smoothly.

"Well, no one ever said you weren't good at lying, Krylancelo. In the meantime, what do you propose we should be doing?"

Slumped in the chair, glaring daggers with fever-glazed eyes, Orphen coughed into his hand and then straightened, making an effort to push back what seemed like a building explosion. "We should be doing something productive rather that just sitting here drinking coffee talking about _nothing_. I wish it were easier to tell how safe it would be to visit the site…"

"You are of a singular mind, I'll give you that. That idea, though, you're out of your tree. I'm not about to set foot in there after what Steph said about the excavation team. They weren't grunts either. They were Tower contracts, all of them, archeology and Nornir scholars. All the heavy lifting was already out of the way by the time they opened it up. Hell, I was there at the time. Like I told you, we thought they caught a spore. Sealed up areas like that, happens all the time, that's what the site supervisor was saying."

"But it's not supposed to be airborne. Right? Somebody said that…"

"And how do you wager Bagup's doing?"

"I don't know," Sidetracked, Orphen leaned back in his chair, hooking an arm over the back of it to look quickly over his shoulder. "Did you hear something?"

"No? When?"

"Just now, som—"

A storm of footsteps thundered through the swinging kitchen door, they belonged to Tim Brickwell who was waxen and pale as the falling snow, breathless and clutching his arm while he lurched in, a gout of bright blood worming between the fingers of the hand he had clamped over his bicep. "You—you—," he choked out.

Hartia was on his feet already, his chair tipping back and clattering to the floor behind him while Orphen caught hold of Stephanie's staggering, injured husband. His knees gave out and they pushed a chair under him, stretching his arm out on the table top between coffee cups and saucers. Tim was grinding his teeth while they pried his hand away from the wound, a rough hole welling with a pulse of rising blood, bitten straight through his overcoat.

"Oh fuck. Fuck!"

"How'd it happen!"

Tim huffed against the pain, sucking breath through his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut. "Thought…I could outrun…but I should've listened to Frank. Ugh, _God_—"

"I can't see…fuck, it's getting everywhere, Hartia, get this goddamn coat off."

Hartia shucked his sweater, then started on tugging the sleeves of the coat, first the uninjured arm, then the other. Tim groaned when the wool dragged over the spurting wound, dropping his forehead down on the tabletop. "Don't let—don't tell Steph yet…"

"Find some iodine," With a folded kitchen towel, Orphen pushed the heel of one bloody hand down on the wound. "We can't stitch this."

"Forget disinfectant. Push harder, it's coming out the sides. He's losing too fast."

He applied more compression, Tim caged a scream behind his teeth, the kitchen door eased open and Cleo was in the doorway, looking small and nervous with her sleep disheveled hair and her eyes wide, her bare toes peeking out from the long hem of a white, matronly nightgown with a high collar.

Hartia watched her step back at the sight. "Cleo," he told her, far more calmly than he felt, "Go wake up Stephanie."

She'd already turned and fled by the time Orphen had glanced up, distracted only a second before returning his focus to Tim's bite. It was barely a minute before Stephanie crashed through the door with a medical kit and her glasses half-falling off her face, already crying and rushing to embrace Tim in his chair, holding his head in both arms and his ear against her chest, speaking tearful words down to him with her cheek settled on the crown of his head. With his uninjured arm wound around his wife's waist, between puffs of strained breath, he was apologizing with his voice tangling up in his throat, telling her he loved her with such a regretful urgency it was as though he may not have another opportunity. And from the way he was losing blood, maybe he wouldn't.

Hartia was unwinding a roll of gauze from the kit while Cleo pulled out a clinking array of bottles, and with a sort of morbid amusement, he watched Orphen avoid looking at her with an almost tangible determination, wrangling his exhausted brain into focus. "Hold the pressure," he told him.

"I'm holding. Get a hemostatic on it and I'll take a shot."

"No way. You say a word toward an invocation and I'll stuff this towel in your mouth."

It was ten minutes of grueling casting and recasting, bloody hands and pressure points to staunch the bleeding. By the end, Tim was faint and pallid, his eyelids heavy, the air thick with the copper smell of blood and sharp, semi-sweet electric scent of overused sorcery, like the smell of ozone after a thunderstorm.

"It's holding for now, keep it wrapped," Hartia told Stephanie. "Get him cleaned up and laid down, and we'll try to figure out what we're going to do."

She merely nodded, leading her husband up from the table with his good arm swung over her neck, and beyond the swinging kitchen door. Standing at the sink, Orphen clearly waited for them to leave earshot before he spoke, wringing a towel between his washed hands with more nervous energy than looked healthy.

"We should have amputated it," he said, and behind him Cleo made a sound of indignant horror, only to have her aggression deflate the moment his eyes landed on her. It was basically a repeat of the same thing he'd seen over and over again for most of his adolescence, except for the idiot's reaction to it. The way he mooned after her like a kicked dog and made up all these reasons to mope and deny it all was even worse than his usual apathy.

Hartia sighed loudly. "It's an infection in the bloodstream. I can't image that would've done anything but make it all worse."

"How can it be worse? Goddamn. How long does he have?"

"Don't ask me. Bagup might know. He read all that pharmacy literature the doctor left him."

"The doctor." Cleo said, matter of factly as though it weren't the most far-fetched thing she may have ever said. "We _have_ to get Dr. Farrior…"

"Yeah, I'm sure he's not busy. Run upstairs and fetch him, why don't you?" The idiot's mouth sometimes seemed to speak for him during those times his reason went absent for whatever reason, which seemed to be often lately. Or at least whenever Cleo was around.

"He must still be in Totokanta," she returned swiftly. "He wouldn't leave the clinic…not with…"

"You never got around to explaining when they left your house before the fire."

"He was called away on emergency," she half-spat, before seeming to swallow her knee-jerk belligerence. "Mrs. Farrior stayed with my mother while Ambrose and Grays went along, since things weren't going so well with the…" She took a slow breath and visibly steeled herself. "They were bringing in a girl, I remember that much…for surgery."

"Even with the fire, you think he'd stay?"

"Yes," she insisted, raking her hands back through her wild, undone hair. The tightness of her posture was a visual gauge for her mounting anxiety. "I shouldn't have left without contacting them. God knows what they must think has become of me."

"Okay, go clean up," Hartia told her. "If you really want to go to Totokanta…if you _really_ _think_ you can find him, I'll take you. Now, today. But wash that blood off, okay? We don't know how infectious this stuff really is. Better safe, you know."

Shocked out of her worries, Cleo nodded, turning on a heel and vanishing through the door almost at the same time Orphen turned a delightfully venomous gaze on him. "The hell!"

"You have a better idea? Get it together. Tim's a ticking time bomb in there now, and who knows about Bagup. You'd rather go searching the dig site for clues to feel productive? What do you think you're going to find there? Shit, that's what. Be practical, just this once. At least, if he's gone, we can rule out any kind of help we're going to get there. You don't think it's worth a try? I can get her there—"

"Not a chance."

"Why not?"

"You want to send only two people, one with absolutely no defenses, out there with everything we've seen so far? You're suggesting _that's_ practical? The whole place has probably burned down by now. Whoever is left in town aren't likely to be the understanding, teamy-fucking-teamwork type you're going to need to find anybody in that pile of rubble. Even if you did find them, then they'll take a day and a half to get here themselves, unless you had stupid plans to transport them back as well. Should we start digging a hole for you in the backyard?"

"That's your reasoning?"

"I'm not letting you do it."

"You're not _letting_ me? You're certainly not going anywhere. If you were going to volunteer, you can just forget it. It's a wonder you're standing. Look at your hands, they're bloody vibrating."

He glanced down, bringing a palm up to observe the effects of copious amounts of caffeine on an empty stomach and days on top of days of anxious sleeplessness. He went to speak, and coughed violently into the hollow of his cupped hand.

"Maybe you should lie down _yourself_. You're coming apart."

"Don't be ridiculous," he croaked, returning to the sink for water. "We have to do something about Tim."

"There's nothing we can do about Tim right now. The best we can do is try to stay calm and hash out all our options."

Stephanie swept back through the kitchen door, tugging on a green cardigan with her hair tied up hastily, face scrubbed pink by the rough sleeves she was using to towel away her tears. "Cleo said you were going to find the doctor? Doctor _Farrior_?"

"That's her plan," Hartia supplied, the sharp dagger of Orphen's glare prickling up his back even while he wasn't looking. "We're not sure quite how to manage it, but she seems quite positive she'll be able to find him."

"Oh, wouldn't it be—" Stephanie sniffed back a tidal wave. "How? From what you said, Totokanta's in no better shape than we are here."

"Krylancelo, meanwhile, feels it would be dangerous, and would prefer to take her himself since he has no faith or trust in anybody else whatsoever."

"Yes," Orphen said thickly, "Since you're just dependable-fucking-Jack, aren't you?"

His comment hit like cold water, and Hartia almost recoiled at the shock. Then, unexpectedly, his tongue took his thoughts and ran with them. "And of course you're never putting others at risk because of your failure to focus on anything but the past, are you? To say nothing of yourself. Yeah, let's have him do it, sounds like a plan."

"This isn't the time for _whatever this is_," Stephanie exhaled, looking dumbfounded and not just a little angry, shifting her weight restlessly. "She's getting dressed upstairs. Hartia, if you can take her, I can't even begin to tell you how much even the effort would mean to me. In the meantime, if you two could put this to the side, that would be better for us all."

"Do you have any idea how long we might have to find him? You said you'd been researching."

"I've been up all night reading what I can find," she said, her voice was dissonant and heavy, like something wooden falling down stairs. "The papers on Rhinehold from the University identify it as a viral hemorrhagic fever with an incubation period anywhere between three and fourteen days, but most often around five to seven. But if treatment doesn't begin almost immediately after infection, there's enormous risk involved. There are several variables. The health of the individual, the source of exposure, speed of viral reproduction, the concentration of the viral load in the pathogen, either blood or saliva. It's spread through open wounds, and the early studies suggest that the biting reflex serves as a mechanism to spread infection." Stephanie typically sounded like she was reciting from an encyclopedia when she was stressed, right now she sounded like an automaton, reciting facts cranked out by cold metal and grinding cogs.

"I remember Bagup saying there were men bitten who didn't get sick at all," Orphen was leaning on the counter, hovering over the sink with his glass of water and angst, his glassy eyes and his blood soaked shirt, looking better than Hartia ever could freshly showered, shaved and in his best robes. It was all he could do not to glower at him with a startling floodgate of animosity opened up that he was having trouble forcing back shut.

"I wouldn't risk hoping for that," he countered angrily.

"_Listen_," Stephanie hissed, wiping at her face, the robot voice already boiled away under the flash heat of her unusual ferocity. "The incubation period is relative. There have been case studies of patients that went feral in a matter of hours after infection. _Hours_ or weeks, we can't know which it's going to be. If we're going to do this, it needs to happen as fast as we can manage or it could all be a waste."

"It's a waste anyway. But what the hell would I know?" Orphen breezed past them both, through the doorway, leaving them in their uncertain silence and exchanging angry glances on which they didn't elaborate.

"Well, since you have no alternative to offer," Hartia snapped after him. Then to Stephanie, he added. "I swear. It's always something else with him. Always."

At that, Stephanie's face went blank, flat, as though stuck by lightning. She didn't even blink for the long moment she stared with her red eyes clouded over in thought. "Whuh-what did you say?"

"I just mean he's never focused, he's scattered off in a million directions, always distracted by something other than what's going on. He can't even be happy when he should be…"

"Always something else?" She repeated it with a weak little breath of a laugh, slouching with her hand catching at her cranium, like suddenly it weighed a metric ton. "That's…funny."

"What's funny? You alright?"

"Always something else. That's the literal translation of the phrase. The runic phrase, the one that's all over the walls in the buried cathedral that seems to have no meaning. Vreecti-dvelt-noctum. It keeps repeating, over and over. I kept reading it differently than that…but that's it. 'Always something else'. It's some kind of soubriquet because of how it's written in radicals, like it's a title. Or a name. I guess it's just weird to hear it out loud when I've been saying different versions of it in my head over and over. Even last night. I was looking up Gris Cygnus in the Book of Epiphany, hoping I might run across that phrase. The Nornir were so particular about words, you know. They crafted sorcery through words. In the same way silence was so sacred in places of worship so that even text was forbidden, so they felt speaking the name of something dreaded would invoke it. Hence why they had these epithets. Even Gris Cygnus…the literal translation is near meaningless. It means _gray swan_." The robot voice had crept back, speaking without being even remotely emotionally engaged. Her eyes couldn't have looked farther away than if they'd been painted on.

"…and did you? Come across it?"

"No," she whispered tiredly, squeezing her eyes shut against the exhaustion and fear that was evident in the lines of her face. She was silent for long enough to hear a whirring howl of wind rattling the terracotta roof tiles. "I can't think straight. Because now, when I hear it said that way, somehow it seems like I've heard that before. I just don't know where."

"Always something else? You could have heard it anywhere. You just heard it from me, after all. You're tired, Steph, and I can only imagine how you feel now. We'll hurry back here as soon as we can. If the doctor's not there, maybe we can still find something useful in the treatment clinic."

Stephanie nodded weakly, sitting heavily down in one of the pulled out wooden chairs, staring at the tabletop with its litter of empty cups, bloodstains and glass medical bottles.

"Something useful," she echoed shakily. Then she bent forward and caught her face in the cradle of her clawed up hands, gulping in a long, ratcheting breath. Her shoulders pulled up tight and then drop-drop-dropped with an onslaught of great, jerking sobs; the flood she'd been fighting off with all of her mechanical brilliance.

Hartia dropped a hand lightly on her back before turning, swallowing a mouthful of inadequate, bumbling words and sweeping quietly back through the kitchen door.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

To be continued…


	12. Spark

**XII: Spark  
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She stood on the second-floor landing with a nervous reluctance, only stopping to fully acknowledge him when he'd centered himself halfway up the stairway, making it clear he intended to hinder her downward progress. With the same hitch in her gait as the night before, she carefully hobbled downward toward him, seeming to expect he'd move aside when she drew close, and instead he braced an arm on the wall, barring her further descent pointedly.

"Trying to tell me something?" she finally asked, still incapable of maintaining any amount of eye contact that lasted more than two seconds. He'd been doing his best not to allow it to drive him straight up the wall, but his limited patience was dwindling rapidly. It was preposterous. They'd almost died together, been through everything imaginable and some things that weren't, and now she couldn't look at him because he'd suffered a moment of total mental shutdown and kissed her. Or maybe because she'd kissed him. He still wasn't positive which it was, and thinking about it didn't clarify anything so he tried like the devil not to.

"How'd you guess? Suppose I'm just lucky you even realized I was standing here."

"What?" Her eyes snapped up from the floor with what he considered a healthy, Cleo-brand, kneejerk response. Then they sank away again. It was enough to make him grit his teeth.

"So you really intend to do this? Even if you can barely walk on that ankle?"

"Of course I do," she said, still gripping the banister and dropping down a few steps, closing the distance so she could keep her voice down. "What kind of person would I be, if I didn't go? Tim _needs_ the Doctor. It's something I can do. It might be the only thing I can do."

"And so do a couple thousand others right now. You really think they just sat around in Totokanta, knowing that?"

"It's barely been a day, they couldn't even have packed everything up in that much time. Even if they could, they couldn't have gotten far!"

"We've gotten all the way here. God knows where they could be. It's not worth it."

"Not worth what? Possibly saving Stephanie's husband from living hell?"

"Not worth putting yourself at risk for such poor odds. And going back _there_ for it, don't you think that's going to affect you?"

"I can take care of myself. And Hartia will be with me."

"Oh fantastic," he hissed at her, practically choking on the hostility that swelled up when she said it. "Shrimp Man to the fucking rescue. Maybe you can ride the bull, too."

She flashed a rankled look at him. "What? Since when don't you trust Hartia?"

"Since never, but that isn't the point. I don't trust him enough for _this_. This is _not_ a normal fucking situation. Everything so far that could have gone wrong, has."

"You don't have to explain to me how bad things are, _Orphen_." Finally she was looking at him, limping down another couple of steps to keep herself from shouting. "You don't think I know it?"

"I think you're about to get yourself in trouble in some kind of attempt to feel in control. Saving Tim isn't going to…" He bit down on the rest of the comment, thinking better of it when it was still partially unsaid, even though she already seemed to have absorbed the gist of what he'd intended. _Saving Tim isn't going to save your mother and Mariabella. _"…change anything."

"You really do think I only do things for myself. Don't you?"

"I think everybody does. Wanting to help is natural, but going out there to do it won't accomplish anything if something happens to you while doing it."

"I think it would. Tim has a wife, didn't you see that in there or do things like that not affect people like you? He has a family. He has people who need him." Her voice had begun to shiver a bit, but she squelched the tiresome emotion buzzing below the surface of her words, seemed to swallow it painfully like it was an angry bee. "What do I have?"

"People like me, huh?" he repeated irritably, "You're just being ridiculous."

"Am I? Of course you would think so."

"Of course I would. You have to be kidding me."

"No, I'm not kidding you. Get out of my way."

"Make me, Iron Woman. You're so sure you can take care of yourself and you can hardly get down the goddamn stairs by yourself?"

She pushed on his arm forcefully, her hands cold even through the fabric of his jacket, before she cast him a defiant look that had the most peculiar effect of making him want to smile and goad her on. It always did. It was the same reaction that wasn't wired correctly in his brain, where intense pain gave him the urge to laugh. Same difference, he supposed.

"How childish can you be?" She spat at him. "Is this because I don't need _you_ for it? You just hate it that much when someone is capable of doing something without you, _Orphen_?"

"I don't know, are you capable of even saying that word without sounding like a huge bitch?" Shit, he hadn't meant to say that.

"What word? That word that isn't even really your name? Is it supposed to sound serious? Maybe I would if you could say mine without sounding like you're talking to a dog or a stupid child."

"Oh well, excuse me, Miss _Cleopatra_."

"You're excused, _Krylancelo_." She spit it back at him so quickly it almost felt like a punch in the throat to hear her say it. He affected an impassive expression even while a bizarre sensation rolled over him, something like an insect with a hundred white hot legs running down his spine.

"Now if you don't mind," she said.

"No, I think I still mind."

"I don't give a _damn_ if you mind!"

"What the hell do you think I'm trying to do here? Be some kind of fucking hero? You don't think there's some kind of reason behind anything I do?"

"Yes, of course, some kind of _fucked up_ reason." She pushed on his arm again, glaring at him. "Well? I'm listening. What is it?"

"The one I gave you isn't good enough?"

"How in the hell is that a good reason? That you think it's safer to stay here and just let Tim turn into one of those things we saw? Then what? I suppose you'll kill him too?"

He dropped his arm off the wall and she weaved at the sudden loss of support, catching at the banister and casting him an evil glare even while he was moving up the stairs past her, their verbal duel abruptly conceded.

"Really," she said behind him, actually seeming surprised. "_That's_ it?"

He didn't answer until he reached the landing, leaning back on the wall, suddenly so tired and heavy it felt almost mysterious that he was still standing. "Is what it? Yeah, I guess it is. If you don't come back."

"Well, if I don't come back at least you can feel all smug to yourself that you were right."

"Does it even fucking occur to you that I _don't_ _want_ to be right?" he sneered. And from the look on her face, maybe he shouldn't have. It lost all of its insolent, fiery determination and just looked up at him, almost devoid of any kind of human sentiment until it decided inevitably on sadness. She didn't say anything, and he was already stomping back down the stairs toward her by the time she began to reply, and nothing came out in time before he was pressing his mouth against hers to swallow anything else she did say.

Mercifully, she didn't push him away or bitten him the way he might have expected if he'd at all planned what he'd done. He hadn't decided on it. But as it was, the way she dug her hands into his hair would maybe have made him forget to breathe if his traitorous body wasn't already entirely possessed of itself, acting as it pleased and dragging him along for the ride. It used his tongue to kiss her as possessive and indecently as it liked, tugging her up against him, feeling the wicked shape beneath her clothing that had taunted him only a little more than an hour before, laughed at him with its shadowy, enthralling landscape of flesh. His hands closed in a tight, convulsive clutch on her and held her there, paralyzed by the velvet slide of her lips, the wet tip of her tongue nudging at the ridge of his teeth with what might have been mistaken for enthusiasm or even ardor. He was lost, electrified with a profound jolt of euphoria, the same one he'd only had a terrifying glimpse of last time. As staggering and alien as only something so long denied could be.

The sound of a door shutting somewhere upstairs made him let her go as suddenly as he'd taken hold of her and she stepped down one stair with a flushed, schoolgirl embarrassment, backed up against the wall with her eyes unable to settle on any one thing for more than a moment, her hand coming up near her mouth—he thought maybe to wipe it angrily. Only then did he remember to exhale, and already he was sick with shame. He'd spent three years keeping his hands and mouth and every other imaginable body part away from her. Now every time she came too close it was like...like he'd lost all capacity for self control and good sense. He didn't even know what he'd been thinking. If he'd been thinking.

What was wrong with him? The stress. His exhaustion. Or maybe it was her, something was certainly wrong with her and there was no denying that. One second she was hanging on him with her hands magnetic and her breath hot as her tears. The next she was hissing and pushing him away, even more venomous than was typical for her on the worst day.

And when he kissed her…she was willing.

He was dizzy; stiff with anxiety and cold, nervous nausea, he had already moved to retreat up the stairs like a cowering dog when her voice floating up after him, sounding muted and far away. "I'm going to come back."

"Yeah." It wasn't the right thing to say. He didn't know the right thing to say. He never did. Never _had_. Maybe there wasn't one. At least he hadn't apologized this time, even though he was definitely sorry.

He threw a glance over his shoulder at her where she stood looking tiny and unsure and sinfully beautiful in her sweater and loose braids and her eyes so full of whatever it was exactly that he couldn't look at. He had to look away. It hurt. Goddamn it, it hurt looking at her. He was so tired. So tired. He wasn't himself. And then the painkillers. He had to get some sleep.

From the top of the upstairs catwalk, after a long minute, he listened to her wobble down the stairs, stop, inhale deeply and walk toward the kitchen. Only when he could be certain she was gone did he draw in a slow, jangled breath and turn toward the wall to numbly drop his head against it.

"I reckon I've seen too much," Bagup said from his doorway, and Orphen felt like someone had wrung his stomach like a wet towel. With his heart leapt into his nose, he cast a queasy, pale look toward the old man with his knowing grin and hollow eyes that looked a little larger than he remembered. Larger and darker, like the eyes of a deer or gazelle. He wasn't looking quite as well this morning as he had the previous couple of evenings. But maybe it was his harried, overtired imagination.

He worked to formulate a reply but instead gave a gesture of embarrassed frustration.

Bagup smothered a chuckle, "You're looking a little afflicted."

"No," he said impotently, holding onto the wall like an idiot. "Just…"

"S'alright, son, you don't have to explain nothing to me."

"I wasn't…_explaining_…" He stared at the wall another long minute before halfway turning toward him, intent on not feeling like a cornered child being forced to admit he'd broken something of value. "You ever…feel like you're not yourself? Kind of like you're losing your mind or something?"

Bagup laughed. "In general or because of a woman?" When Orphen dropped his forehead into his hand, he laughed again. "I'd be lying if I told you I hadn't. The right kind of woman can make you think up is down for a minute and believe it. That one making you feel that way?"

"That up is down?" He glanced down the empty stairway briefly, exhaling hard and long, abandoning pride briefly for a breath of a laugh. "Only…constantly."

"You tell her that?"

"Hunh…" Whatever that meant.

"Guess that means no, huh?"

"N…no, I…what are you talking about, old man?" His throat was so dry it hurt now. The anesthesia of shock was wearing off and revealed his peeled raw nerves.

Bagup gave him a sympathetic smile, sick and gaunt with his eyes bigger than they seemed they should have been and his iron gray hair bedraggled with a night of sleep. "You got it bad, huh?"

When Orphen didn't answer, Majic's father leaned on the catwalk's railing. "Well, don't think you're the only one."

"What's that mean?" He pulled a shaky hand through his hair, casting a wistful glance down the stairwell.

"It means what I said. She's been over at the Inn with Maj so much lately, I'm bound to catch wind of a thing or two. Been over there cryin' and twisting herself up over marrying this boy she don't want. Ambrose. I can hear her talking to Maj about it, you know, saying 'Orphen this' and 'Orphen that' about it all. I can put it together on my own after awhile, you know."

"…oh…" Well, whatever he was supposed to say was lost in whatever he was supposed to think. His knees didn't seem like they wanted to hold him up much longer as it was.

"Majic's mother was the same way, you know. Iris, it's a shame you couldn'ta met her. She'd have liked you teaching Maj." Bagup smiled wide, leaning on his hand. "She was a pistol. Nothing like Majic, he's timid like I was as a kid. Guess it's genetics for you."

"I guess."

"Woman had me running away from her and after her at the same time. They make you question your sanity, I can guarantee you that."

He wasn't sure what made him ask, maybe just the opportunity to shift the attention off of himself. "How'd you meet?"

"St. Lucifel. We were born there, both of us. She was a good bit younger than me but, funniest thing, we just never could get the hang of one another. We'd fight over nothing, just to fight. She moved away when she came of age, to Meverlenst to do instruction there in sorcery. Didn't see her for years 'til one day, there she was, back in town at the tobacconist's, buying pipe leaves for her old man. It was like a tornado hit me, you know. We struck up an argument just like we'd seen each other every day, but…" Bagup shook his head a little, quieting down. Thinking about it. About her. He'd brought her up a few times in the last couple of days. Probably he'd been thinking of her a lot since getting sick. Since it had entered his head he might not make it. "Last thing my mother'd had in mind for me, o'course. Marrying a sorceress. They were kind of those types, I'm sure you know, not too keen on the magic folk."

"I know the ones."

He nodded. "Still. Nobody could tell me anything about that, not knowing Iris. She wouldn't have any of that from anybody. Even living in Totokanta after Maj was born, there's a lot of ignorant folk round there, all those country bred good old boys. She'd have a hard time of it sometimes, taking Majic around town, hearing what they'd say about the baby or me, for marrying her. They could say what they wanted about her, but…she had a hard time with that. But, even when I'd ask her, she always said she wouldn'ta done a thing any different. Her whole life, even…" Bagup cleared his throat. "Even in the hospice, right before she passed on. She always said, she wouldn't have changed anything. She used to say that love isn't supposed to be easy, but that it pays its own bills."

"…how did she die?" Not that he probably wanted to talk about it.

"Her heart," Bagup said curtly, and even after all the years it had been, most of Majic's life as far as he'd heard, he could tell from his voice how much it still hurt. "It wasn't ever too good. She was real young for it though, only forty-four. Maj wasn't more than 'bout seven at the time. I…I think what's worst about it is that he…I don't think he remembers her much. Not like I do, anyway."

"At least he has that," he said. Not bitterly. It was just a fact that he didn't recall his parents, nothing more than an image or two in his memory that he may just as well have made up or seen somewhere else. The man in his memory he thought might be his father could just as well have been a firewood man or a grocer. The face of his mother could have been something he'd seen in a newspaper or someone in the street. Anybody. He had no way of knowing, but it wasn't something he felt actively bad about. Not for a long time, anyway. He'd had a lot to distract him from it for a good while. Azalie had been an acceptable replacement for family for a long time in his boyhood, and losing her and been like losing them all over again, even if he couldn't remember it.

Funny. He'd lost the first half of his mind over Azalie, it was just as well and fitting that he'd lose the second half over Cleo. Then it would all be gone and he could be done with losing it over anyone else in the future.

"You know. Before these last couple of days, there was only one time in my life I really felt sure I was about to die."

"O…oh?" This was all getting weird fast. Maybe Bagup really was sicker than everybody had thought.

"Before Majic was born. Actually, before me and Iris was even married. She'd, uh…" He threw in a sort of self-conscious chuckle. "She'd broken it off with me. Said we couldn't see each other no more, that we couldn't get married. Crushed me. I was taking her back home from Sun Lake to St. Luce, and it was mid-summer, wettest part of the year. I shoulda prepared for it, but I was crushed. Probably not paying much attention to the road. Anyhow, it started to storm. You know the roads out there. They were already mud by then and I guess they started collapsing. The horses were straining around in the mud, going downhill along the side of the mountain, and before you know it, we were sliding around. Careening, going way too fast, and the horses wouldn't mind the crop or the reins. They were scared, I guess. The carriage wheels slipped off course, the horses were bucking and heaving against it but, the whole thing went down the mountainside."

Bagup coughed into his hand, pausing to look off and focus on the floor, remembering it. "In a raging rain, no less. I remember, ha, I just remember how…it felt like time stopped for a second. And I wasn't afraid for myself. It's not like I wanted to die, you know, but I wasn't scared for myself as I was for Iris. I know that probably sounds stupid to you. The other thing I remember most about it, was that neither of us…I don't know…. When we went over, when the wheels went off the road, both of us, we just reached for each other. Like we'd planned it or…like we could save each other from what was happening. Even though she'd broken it off, said she didn't want to marry me…"

In the silence of the corridor, Orphen shifted uncomfortably against the wall. For the second time in only a few minutes, he wasn't sure what the right thing to say was. If there was one.

"Obviously, we didn't die. We went end over end down the mountain, everything tumbling around inside the carriage, the wood cracking and all that around us. Just awful, horrifying. The carriage settled upside down, eventually, against some trees. Her arm was broken. I cracked a few ribs. But nothing was different after it. We still fought like a cat and dog. It made us…rethink a few things, I guess. We _did_ get married. You know that one, of course."

Finally, Orphen pushed off the wall and folded his arms tightly against the winter chill. "Why are you telling me this?"

Bagup gave a faint shrug, moving past him and starting down the stairs in his dressing gown and overcoat. "I don't know. I guess I just thought of it. Seemed like you needed to hear it."

"I needed to hear that?"

"Yeah, well, you know. With you thinking up is down and all that." He stopped in the stairway, not far from where he'd inadvertently said goodbye and probably more to Cleo.

He watched him disappear down the stairs, his undone bootlaces scratching along behind him toward the kitchen. Never having had a father had made being fathered by anybody feel rather intrusive, particularly this time around, with whatever point he'd been trying to make with all that. He'd definitely had some kind of point, something about regret and his dead wife, though it was clearly wasted on him at the moment. Honestly, as though he didn't feel bleak enough on his own, the old man's sad retrospect wasn't helping him feel anything but anxious.

He found his pack in the guest bedroom where he'd left it, dragged it to the washroom and slowly, distractedly went about trying to clean up with his mind heavy and sodden like an overfilled sponge. He struggled painfully out of his jacket and demolished shirt, the last of the opium tincture having worn off in his last flash of adrenaline, his stitched wound stiff and pulsating with every limping, quick beat of his heart. Keeping his eyes on the wash basin, the water quickly darkened to the color of rust with the mess he cleaned off his arms and hands and hair, determined to avoid the reflection in the mirror mounted on the wall of the ineffectual fool that couldn't do a simple thing like keep his damn hands off of a frail, grieving girl.

Much less save Stephanie's husband. Or Majic's father. Cleo's family. Or anyone else. Everyone else that was trapped in this house, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for an answer, waiting for anything. He was in such poor shape that Hartia would be out looking for answers while he was forced to sleep. Hartia would be taking Cleo to find her maybe-jilted fiancé's father in a city they'd only just fled, the city where she'd lived her whole life and had just watched her home crumble and family die. And he would be here, resting, laying down like an ill child. The whole idea made him sick to his stomach, and the cold water on his face did little to calm it, only served to bring attention to his enduring fever from the accelerated healing process of what was truly a nasty wound. He scrubbed his wet hands through his hair, avoiding the painful knot where he'd struck the slick pavement and nearly been devoured by the walking dead; those infected with the disease that lingered beyond death. He wasn't a goddamn doctor, but he didn't have to be to know it didn't make any biological sense. The dead are dead. They don't walk. They don't bite. Only in stories of forbidden sorcery had he ever heard of such a thing. The feuds of the nine dragon families whose arcane magicks had lain forgotten for a millennium, and their terrifying, malicious deities, armies of the dead risen at the hand of demons and men who had lost their souls. It only made sense to make it back to the dig site. The correlation was undeniable, even the general population knew it. Whatever the kid had said about it, about sorcerers being responsible, about the Gris Cygnus…he couldn't ignore it. Hartia had asked what he thought he'd find, and it wasn't that he'd thought they'd find an answer there. Not an answer. Just maybe a direction. And yes, maybe that was dangerous, irrational, but he'd take that over paging through more runic idiom grimoires and reference guides for hours on end, looking for matches on archaic metaphorical phrases that meant nothing, looking for straws to grasp at like he'd already been doing for months anyway. If there had been literature about the walled off section of the buried temple anywhere, they would have found it by now.

It wasn't a temple, he knew that much. It was something else. A tomb. And the fact they had found so little, nothing referencing a buried complex in Bazilkok behind the ruined shrine, while it could have made it seem unimportant, he couldn't help but think it made it seem as though it had been hidden away for a reason. They'd never get any further toward a solution without going back.

If there _was_ a solution, going out to Bazilkok was the first step in finding it. At least he would feel as though he was working toward something. Not sitting around in Stephanie's house, locked in and waiting. That was his version of hope, a proactive one. Because, as much as it didn't feel like it, there had to be that. Hope. Even if he had to work himself into the ground and bleed for it, he was going to put that shine of foolish, guileless hope back into Cleo's dead eyes. That's what it had been that he couldn't look at. He'd kissed her and she'd looked back at him with eyes completely vacant of her spark.

It was why he'd originally allowed her to continue accompanying them. Because she got him going, moved him forward when he had sunk into indolence and self-loathing. The fact was that Azalie had been right about him that way. And Cleo, she was the infuriating eternal optimist that stomped out his negative bullshit whenever she heard it. She moved him.

But as he was right now, he wasn't going anywhere. Not on his own, certainly. He couldn't even take of himself like this. Without another thought, he went for the laudanum bottle, sitting corked on the countertop, catching the outside light from the window with all its clear, silvery promise. A sip of the dead-flower tasting bitter was all it would take to fade the pain enough to sleep. He took two.

Toweling his head, he abandoned his clean shirt on the desk after fighting and failing to pull it over his head; the movement aggravated the wound too much to make it worth the effort. He dropped into the guest bed, drawing up the blankets and burying his face in the feather pillow. Already he was close to sleep, sinking down like diving into deep water, breathing in the sweet scent of lavender and smoke, something warm and familiar…

Cleo. She'd slept here last night, or at least part of the night. Just with the scent, he could recall her hands and her breath, the pressure of her mouth, the light scrape of her teeth over his bottom lip, and that hot shiver prickling down his back when she said his name. Not _Orphen_. His _name_, something she didn't ever say. He reared up on his elbows and flipped the damned pillow over.

It hadn't always been like this. He'd used to have control over the things he thought about her, even after accepting his pathetic case of lovehate, his health-mangling malevolent adoration of her that in this time of confusion when he needed clarity and strength and focus-seemed to be the thing completely sinking him. As much as it seemed arrogant to say it, everyone was waiting on him to do something. He had to protect them, to shepherd them through this, Cleo included. While he was sinking into unconsciousness, the ache in his shoulder was beginning to fade like background music dwindling slowly to airy silence. Even so, her words came back to him.

_He has a family. He has people who need him. What do I have?_

She had _him_. _He_ needed her. Honestly, he didn't really know how to say or even explain it, but he needed her. He hadn't said it, and there was no reason in the world why she'd know it. He'd never shown her any inordinate amount of fondness, only mild tolerance and antagonism. Even just now on the stairwell, he'd fought with her and fed her flames, called her names and then kissed her like a jackass. Even he would admit it didn't make any sense. Nothing made any sense right now, not probably for anybody. Even if he tried to focus, it was like trying to look directly at the sun. It was too much, all of it, and he had to look away because it hurt and it was all more than he could stand.

Maybe that's what Bagup had been telling him. That he was careening. That if he didn't get it together, he was going to pull everyone off the edge with him.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

To be continued…

_Just a note: The car-wreck scene with Bagup and Iris was inspired by a recent entry at an advice column at the Rupus, "Dear Sugar". A strange story that made me think about my own strange story, and I couldn't help but borrow the idea for this story. If you don't read Sugar, I advise you to check it out._


	13. Maledictis

**XIII: Maledictis**

Somehow, it was easier to recognize the smell than it was to describe it. It was something known by a primitive intuition, greeted by a visceral revulsion and nausea. If a scent could be called thick, it was thick, almost a taste more than a scent. Something was burning that had once been alive, and it filled the streets with a greasy smoke from a noisome incense. The oily reek of smoldering fat in a frying pan.

They were torching bodies, heaps of the beloved dead of Totokanta who only days before may have been walking in the markets. Bodies that had, presumably, ceased to move and walk and bite and do all the things that had once seemed so impossible for the dead to accomplish. Perhaps just those who had succumbed to the disease without becoming one of the abominations. The plaza was heaped with the smoldering haystacks of smoking corpses with their clothes and hair turned to ash, the flesh baked black and cracked to show the cooked meat inside, wet and red. While picking across the plaza toward Shelf Street, still holding onto Hartia's hand, Cleo inclined forward into the grubby remains of the overnight snow, sunk down on her haunches instead of her knees, gagging but producing nothing but the sound. He pulled her up after a moment of it, watching her face tighten with the rage and grief of seeing her home ground reduced to soot blackened brick and mortar, its streets deceptively still and devoid of its typical bustle of busy, impolite humanity. The heaps of burning corpses were the only immediate indication anyone was left alive at all. At least anyone with any sort of foresight and reason.

She was dragging the edge of her mantle over her face, wiping away tears before he could see them, catching her breath with every quick exhale clouding up around her face. It wasn't as though he hadn't known Krylancelo was right in a way—that allowing her to return here in her fragile state would be possibly asking for a mess—but they were here now. At least it was something. Forward motion.

His kneejerk volunteerism had been well intentioned enough, and at least being proactive had felt like a better idea at the time than sitting locked up in the dark Brickwell house all day, waiting for Tim to deteriorate. From what he'd heard, the expected timeframe was anything but clear. It could be days. A week or more before they had a living corpse on their hands. Or, he'd already be dead by the time they returned. There was just no way to be sure, not without the Doctor, at least.

"The Clinic is on Burgess," Cleo said softly, tightening her scarf over her ears to keep the wind out, squinting against it. He watched her lick her lips.

"How certain are you," he began, casting a grim glance over the hazy expanse of the snowy plaza, ash-gray dotted with smoldering orange, giving a tight shrug. "You really think they'll have stayed, even seeing this? What's gone on here looks as bad as Alenhaten."

"You want to turn back? We're here _now_, and Burgess is only a couple blocks east."

Without further comment, he took hold of her arm, steadying her gently so she could walk with her weight distributed off her sore ankle. He'd performed a light restorative charm on it the night before, but it was still swollen. What she needed was rest, but instead they were hobbling through half-melted then frozen-over snow into empty streets with compromised visibility. The fog had mostly lifted, and now was replaced with the horrific smelling smoke. Cleo had already brought up a handful of her pelt-lined cape to cover her nose and mouth.

They'd barely gone a block before they had to stop. The smell, the heavy, putrid stink permeated the makeshift filter of the cloak Hartia held over his face, it soaked up through his nostrils and into his brain. Seeped into everything; he could smell it on his skin already. It settled at the base of his tongue like oil and he had to turn away to gag and spit, cough wildly into his palm to free himself of the feeling that it was filling his lungs, asphyxiating him.

Maybe it was the sound that drew them. Cleo had only half-undone her scarf with the intention of tying it over her face when she instinctively spun toward a sound. A howl.

A high, grinding wail that made them both straighten, go cold. The scraping sound of shambling footsteps, getting quicker. They were unmistakable, the way they walked with dragging toes and arms hanging loose, but faster than what they'd seen before when they'd been hindered by the deep snow, they walked at nearly the same speed as they would have if they had been alive. When they saw them cowering there against the exterior brick wall of a flame blackened dress shop, and began to run. An arm-swinging, full-tilt run. They opened their mouths, emitting that screaming, jarring howl and Cleo was gripped by an inescapable cringe, bringing her palms up against her ears to block out the sound, stopping dead when she should have been running.

It was just reflex. The self-preservation instinct gone awry; sanity before safety. She'd had all she could take of this already. This is what Krylancelo had meant, what he'd known was true. Cleo with all her fire and spirited resilience: she wasn't that Cleo today.

With a curse, Hartia snatched one of her clawed up hands and hauled her forward into a hobbling sprint on her weak ankle, tearing toward Burgess only to find it flooded with the same screeching, lurching dead. He was fighting just to tow her along; her legs seemed to have stopped functioning entirely. Instead she was standing dumbly in the road, staring glassy-eyed in a kind of terrormute revulsion at an enormous mountain of a man that was lumbering toward them on mangled, gangrenous feet, naked as the day he'd been born and just as bloody. His great overhanging gut obscured most of where his genitalia would have been if it hadn't been a mess of gore, ripped or bitten off long enough before that the blood that rolled down his worm white legs had dried into crust. He opened his mouth full of bloodstained teeth and let out that same, unearthly howl, and Hartia watched her face lose its pallor completely.

"Cleo!"

She backed up into him, grabbing hold of his clothing for support. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out.

With a swing of his free arm, he spit out an attack. "Light!"

The sparse but thickening crowd exploded backward, knocked prone and scrabbling at the crust of snow still slick on the cobblestones with their frostbite blackened fingers, nails ringed with blood and filth. The fat man sprawled on the ground, obscene on his back, pale folds of bruised and bitten flesh steaming from Hartia's attack. He wailed with his lolling, nerveless tongue, rocking awkwardly to begin the climb to his feet.

He was dragging her while she stared, her feet stumbling under her while she craned her neck around, strangely rapt at the sight. "They can't feel anything anymore," he reminded her sharply.

"No…Hartia…"

"Which way is the Farrior clinic?"

"Hartia!"

She let out a sob when he snatched her off her feet. Firing another weak bolt of light into the crowd, he ran blindly while more than half-carrying her, still drained from the distance and strain of the translocation from Alenhaten. Teleportation magicks hadn't been devised as a method of transportation but chiefly of defense, an efficient method of eluding danger at short range. While it could be used for travel, the further the distance between departure and arrival and the weight of the burden carried took an enormous toll that grew exponential with every additional furlong. Between the exhaustion, the stress and all the noxious smoke, he was dizzy and nauseated, his heart slamming in his chest.

He ran east, skirting the sidewalks and drifts of grubby snow until she cried for him to stop. The makeshift signage was knocked down, trod upon and cracked in half. Hand-painted, it read "Dr. Ezra Farrior-Emergency Treatment Available."

As soon as Hartia swung her down, Cleo began slamming her palms against the locked door. She yelled while Hartia hissed at her to quiet down.

"Doctor!" She cried, her voice faltering. "Ambrose! Grays!"

From down the icy road the shuffling dead were coming up fast, dragging their numb feet, the bruised whale of a man lumbering ahead of them wildly and Cleo let out another sob, now desperate. She pounded her palms into the door; she shook the locked knob violently. "_Doctor_! It's Cleo!"

"Enough of that," Hartia spat, knocking her away and clutching the handle. "I invite thee, gate of origin."

Under his hand, the knob turned. He pushed her in ahead of him, slamming the door firmly. Crumpled on the floor, Cleo was pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, clearing away the murk of smoke and tears, swallowing down the obvious compulsion to slump forward and weep openly. Hartia pulled her up, steadied her in the dark, debris littered lobby and she clung there for a moment, shaking, before she pushed off him almost angrily. There was no light, no lanterns lit. No sign there was anyone at all.

She stood, her forehead and palms resting on the wall behind the door, catching her shuddering breath.

"I should look at your ankle," he offered, but she rolled her head back and forth on the wall. _No_.

He waited a few seconds, breathed deep before asking. "You know any of them? Out there?"

Cleo rolled her head to the side again to look at him. The wet shine of her eyes caught the light from the milkglass windows. She nodded.

"Maybe we should go."

She wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist, limping forward ahead of him, ignoring his proffered helping hand.

The clinic, dark and tomb silent upon inspection, was as abandoned as they'd been warned it would be. They slowly crept, shoesoles scratching on gritty tile from room to room, as though any infected wouldn't have come running toward the cacophony they'd made crashing through the door. When they reached the back room, a dark, dank lab cluttered with steel gurneys with crumpled green sheets, Cleo finally spoke, more loudly than he would have expected, another indiscretion born from her obvious aggravated anger.

"Nobody's _here_."

Hartia lurched forward to quiet her, but the call had barely left her mouth before a something, a response, drifted up from the black corner of the room. From somewhere down below the stairs leading into the open storm cellar: that same kind of rasping, inhuman screech.

Neither had time to swing toward the cry, to react, before there was another sound behind them. A loud, metallic shuffle. A bullet being cycled into the chamber of a rifle. And a voice.

"You shouldn't have come here."

ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo

There was a voice in the dark, spoken hot and low against his ear, and Orphen twitched awake.

There was a moment of dull brained panic before recognition, then another once a measure of wakefulness had settled in and allowed him enough clarity to comprehend that she was unbuckling his belt. He blearily reached down for her hands only to find them moved busily elsewhere, jerking open his trousers with her little quick, rabbit breaths against the flesh of his neck, raising tiny hairs everywhere. Even the touch of her hand had become something he could distinguish anywhere, even half-asleep.

Cleo.

He opened his mouth to speak, but only a wordless sound emerged somewhere between a grunt, a rough exhale and a breath of overwhelmed, incredulous laughter. She smothered the noise with her open lips, dipping in her tongue, swallowing any kind of hesitation or doubt he may have had about the wisdom of proceeding. Her hands were on him, brazenly exploring while his blood pressure climbed and he reached for her but somehow missed, only managing to catch a brush of skin and hair while she shifted over him. A slide of leg and knee over his hip; he could feel her bare legs, one on either side of him. In his chest, his heart rattled in its bone cage, jumping up under her fanned out hands like an animal desperate for attention. He wanted to say something, but wasn't clear on what. Not a protest so much as a warning, a plea to slow down or whatever was about to happen would be over before he was even lucid. And he'd waited too goddamn long for this to be cheated out of any of it.

It wasn't immediately apparent how long he'd slept, but it was dark now. Too dark to see much of anything when he wanted to see _everything_. Somehow it was all inordinately frustrating. He reached again, caught her pivoting waist, twisting her to the side to roll over her. She went limp, allowing him to move her as he pleased, her mouth soft and pliable, opening under his now in an almost familiar way, skin cool beneath his clutching hands while they towed up the hem of her nightgown higher over the hugging cradle of her thighs. Hooking fingers under the edge of the undergarment he felt there, he tugged it aside, a wet warmth slick against his knuckles evoked a wicked tremor.

Again, he tried to speak to her. To whisper something, tell her what he was going to do to her if she kept laying there, goading him on. To say anything, but—

Without any warning, the bedroom door exploded open, slamming back on its hinges, flooding the room with staggering light. Orphen cowered under it, squeezing shut his eyes and coming up on his hands, squinting lividly into the doorframe where Hartia was standing and casting a sharp shadow, regarding them with a pale expression of revulsion. Again he opened his mouth to speak, to yell, but only a weak, trembling cough came out.

"It's always something else with you," he said, without even a glance at his face to gauge his reaction. He didn't look up, didn't meet his eyes, just stared at Cleo. And where he'd expected she would launch into motion in either a crushing flood of embarrassment or a ferocious diatribe, she lay as motionless and silent as his own ability to speak. Mortified. With his sight still adjusting, voice lost and useless, he dropped his eyes to where she lay frozen. And it wasn't Cleo.

It was Mariabella, corpse-white and shriveling, her glassy dead gaze aiming across the bloodwet sheets toward the open door. The tarry mess of congealed blood from her bite wounds was all over his hands, smeared on his chest.

With an explosion of movement, he woke with a scream clawing its way up his throat and landed on the wooden floor, driving his wounded shoulder hard into the floorboards.

It was still daylight. In a heap on the ground, he restrained a reflexive heave of his stomach until he could wobble to his feet and vomit properly in the washroom. What came out was a slurry of masticated toast, coffee, bile and somewhere mixed in, the two shots of laudanum he knew, _damn well knew_ he shouldn't have taken. He'd said it before. He reacted poorly to opiates, to any kind of narcotic.

They made him sick. Restless and anxious. And apparently, it twisted his dreams into torturous, alarming profanity.

He emptied the remaining contents of his stomach into the wash basin. Then wrung it dry with a few minutes to dry heaving just in case something had stayed behind. It wasn't just the opium, it was the shock of the pain, throbbing like a second heartbeat in his stitched-together shoulder. With his stomach still writhing in him, he dropped to the floor again, propping himself against the wall with his head back, sweat spilling down the bent curve of his back while he fought for breath, listening to the distant rush of the wind outside and the high ringing in his ears from his soaring blood pressure.

Leave it to him to destroy what would have been, under any other circumstances, an immensely enjoyable dream with the disgusting and bizarre. And then, who was he to be surprised that Hartia had found a way to horn in and point a finger at him even in his own lurid, inexplicable nightmare? He hadn't fought him hard enough to keep them from going back to Totokanta, he wasn't sure why. Maybe because there had at least been a point in it. Really, after the tense conversation they'd had in the kitchen, it wasn't that difficult to explain his appearance in a dream.

He couldn't say the same for Mariabella. With a sudden lurch, he climbed to his knees and heaved again, his stomach muscles protesting the violence of the action, squeezing the remaining contents of his stomach out hard enough to hurt. Just a burning wash of bile he had to spit into the basin.

"Shit," he whispered to himself. Over and over. Testing his voice that, in the dream, wouldn't even work. His voice, his main method of offense.

It was just anxiety. Being holed up here with no practical plan. Or at least something any more viable than finding the source, as though he could stop it, like throwing himself in front of a moving train.

Maybe that was just it. He couldn't conceive of being able to stop it. Only hiding from it until it blew over. Hell, it had only been a couple days. It felt like it had been a month.

It was long minutes before he was able to stand. Longer still before he could do much more than prop himself on the sink and stare down into it, glance at his disheveled reflection with its seemingly enormous shadow ringed eyes, waxen complexion and damp mop of black hair. He had an odd compulsion to find a pair of scissors and cut it all as short as he could, if only it would assuage the overwhelming heat pumping from the furnace of his head. In the mirror, he could see a leak of fresh blood staining the sling of bandages that wrapped his throbbing shoulder, the wound reopened from the sudden impact with the floor. Sleeping whatever negligible amount of time he had seemed to have done little good. If it was possible, he might have felt worse. Certainly more shaken. He supposed waking in such a manner could do such things to someone in already poor shape.

Back in the bedroom, he sat at the earliest available opportunity: the writing desk near the washroom door, its surface still a chaotic scatter of parchment and dog eared texts from Stephanie's and the University library. He sat, stared at it all in the slant of what looked like early afternoon light filtering through the slats in the plantation shutters, leaning on his elbows, his gaze landing hard on his own handwriting on a scrap of paper. A latinized version of the runic phrase that no one could yet translate, at least not in context. _Vreecti-dvelt-noctum._

He blinked at it a long few minutes, waiting to feel more normal, a feeling that never came. The phrase, naturally enough, was written in radicals. Like a title or a name. But it was a nonsense phrase, what would be a familiar placeholder for something else. What Stephanie called a sobriquet.

Something else. Always something else. That was how it read, in basic meanings of the runes. Funnily enough, it was what Hartia had said to him at the table that morning. What he'd said in the dream. And it wasn't that he wasn't correct. He was always looking for a distraction. Something else to earn his focus so he wouldn't have to make a choice. About the Tower. About anything. Azalie was right about it all, which was funny in its own way. Azalie herself always seemed to be one thing or another, never the same thing twice. Sister, mother, goddess, demonbeast, unholy avenger, sweetfaced Madonna. Always changing, like the color of the ocean at dusk.

Always. Maybe the same could be said about him.

In that same vein of that which could be more than one thing, archaic runes had multiple readings, dating back to regional origin. Om readings. Hon readings. Symbols imported from older dialects, different dragon families from the far continents on the other side of the impassable seas. In context, in sets, they could be read differently. Rarely were they read in straight phonetics. In cases such as these especially. Never in names. But Om readings…any of these, he didn't know them by heart. He'd been awful with runes in school, they bored him to the edge of his severely limited patience and sometimes right over it.

He'd always been about application over theory. If only someone could have convinced him, back at school that, contrary to his opinion, memorizing rune groups and transliteration would be something he'd actually need one day.

Besides. Steph would have looked them all up already. Still, just as a distraction from that lingering images of the thankfully fading nightmare, he spent a few minutes languidly flipping pages, looking in the codex. The Om readings were: Ure. Dnat. Urab. The Hon readings: Hol'gh. Braik. Chattur.

All of which meant even less that the phonetic reading, if that was even possible. He wrote them down then slammed the tome shut, dropped his head on the cover. When he inhaled, the smell of musty paper and old binding glue. He breathed there a long moment before he became distinctly aware of a second pattern of breath, the dry accordion sound of moving air, just beyond his shoulder. He jerked up to find Majic behind him, who started visibly, bringing his arms up in an instinctive shield.

"Sheesus. How long have you been standing there?"

"Just…just a minute, Master. I didn't know if you were asleep there…"

"I'm not." He cast him a dark glance, Majic shifted the same way he always did when his Master was less than convivial.

"Stephanie asked me to check on you. See if you were up."

"I'm up."

"Okay." He fidgeted. Stared a moment longer than seemed normal. "Well, would you…come downstairs? Stephanie's pacing a hole in the floor. I know she would appreciate some better conversation than I've got to offer today."

"What makes you think I can do any better?" He leaned his forehead on his hand, the heat pooling in his palm.

"I guess nothing. I've…Dad's told her as much as we've read. Everything the Doctor said. Did you get some rest?"

"Couldn't stay asleep."

The boy shrugged. "…that's understandable. I had the same problem."

Orphen watched Majic plant himself on the foot of the bed and sweep a hand around the back of his neck, looking as sallow and gaunt as his own reflection had looked. He forced a smile: a tired imitation, pleasantry stretched over something deep and empty.

"Worried about your old man, huh?"

If Majic was surprised, he didn't show it. Instead, that same twist of his mouth from before appeared, an almost bitter expression that wasn't at home on the kid's usually sweet face. "He shouldn't be walking around acting like he's just fine. He almost died. He could have died and he keeps saying it's…not a big deal. He's more upset at leaving the Tavern. Like we could've saved it. Or like staying close to Mom's grave…" Majic gave a petulant shrug. "It's stupid. It's like he thinks I'm still five years old and I still believe she's just gone away for a long time. He never wants to talk about anything with me. He'll tell me when I'm older. That's what he always tells me. Then he almost dies and I take care of everything for him, weeks on end, taking care of him and the Inn…the customers, everything. And he acts like I didn't do anything at all. I don't even think he wants me to learn sorcery."

Orphen sighed aloud. He'd never understand what it was about him that loosened everybody's tongue. He stood, reached for the clean, brick-colored shirt he'd left on the edge of the desk. Finally able to focus, he looked: the clock read just past noon. He'd barely slept five hours.

"Then-not worried, I guess?"

"I'm worried," Majic almost spat, then shrank. Looked guilty like a scolded dog. "'Course I am. After everything we saw…"

Majic paused, his anxious, almost sick expression continuing to speak even after his voice was finished. It said a lot he wouldn't. Nothing either of them wanted to discuss. Not the least of which who would be getting the job of putting these people, his father and Tim, down like a rabid dog when they turned. It would be unspoken, if Bagup hadn't point blank asked Orphen to end him when the time came…if it came.

Majic didn't need to know that. The request was already on his face. Stephanie wouldn't be ready to ask anything of the sort. Not yet. But she would, because there was no one else they could trust to do it as they asked. No one else had hands dirty enough.

God, it was true. They were all depending on him. Somehow, he was the shepherd, the captain of this lost ship. How could they ask him to kill and save in the same unspoken breath?

ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo

"Listen, darling, you know I'm simply thankful to see you alive." Farrior looked more than exhausted while he nervously replaced the safety hammer on the weapon, clearly out of place in his nervous, white hands. His always sculpted back arrangement of mushroom-colored curls had become a wild nest, his muslin stock hanging untucked and wilted under the pompous array of an unbuckled damask waistcoat, forcing his pince-nez back in place while he struggled impatiently with the rifle stock. "I understand what the last few days must have been like for you. The incident at the Manor claimed my wife along with your family. Everything I've done since that moment has been in an effort to prevent something like that from happening again. The rioters had opened up the clinic before I'd even arrived here. The poor girl up front had told them I wasn't here…"

"And instead she told them where they _could_ find you. I'm afraid I'm unable to feel sorry for her death."

"It's not fitting for a lady to be so cold, Cleopatra, even in mourning we must be respectful. She meant no harm in it." Sitting in the lamplight, Farrior removed his glasses and set them gently on the tabletop, pinching the bridge of his nose where they had been secured. Behind him, behind the drawn medical curtains of the clinic, there was a growling, the same kind they had heard from the storm cellar. An inhuman sound, and a jerking of bed restraints that made her skin go cold. "Just as I do not mean your friend harm by being unable to leave my clinic to treat him. Couldn't you have brought him here? If you could bring him in for treatment…"

"No," she whispered, casting a glance back at Hartia. "No, we talked about it, but he's lost too much blood from the bite to be moved…in such a way."

"Your _sorcerer friend_ thinks it's a better idea to let him die up in Alenhaten, I suppose." Standing behind her chair, Hartia shifted under the weight of unspoken rancor that had saturated his tone in that comment.

"No, just…" Cleo twisted the flat of her fist into one of her tired eyes. "You won't consider it?"

"This disease has a complicated mechanism, Cleopatra. I don't expect you could understand it, but the speed of treatment after infection is paramount to-"

"Don't tell me I _can't understand_! That's why I'm here, because I know it has to be fast. If all he needs is the antibody, give it to me…and I'll do it myself."

"You said the same thing when it came to your friend, the Innkeeper. I'm afraid it's not as simple as you want to think."

"I know it's not simple, but it's cut and dry whether you're going to help us or not."

"You expect me to leave all these people just to work on your friend? Honestly, how could I?"

She bunched up her fists. "Doctor, _these people_ are already dead. I've _seen_ them—"

That made him blink at her. He ground the palm of his hand into his temple on one side, mussing the nest of iron gray that crowned his seemingly overlarge head. "These people are struggling, and they've paid for care. I cannot in good conscience leave them here while—"

"They're dead. Doctor Farrior, those…they aren't even people anymore when they act like this. Their minds are long gone. Don't you think I saw what happened? Those people, in my house. Haven't you checked them once they get like…" She pointed to the curtains behind him with tears making their way down her face. "Once they start acting like animals? We had to fight them, on the way up to Alenhaten. They're out there walking around, eating what they find, and they're dead. They don't bleed, don't have a heartbeat, and you want to sit in here while they bring in one after another that you can't help? You'd rather do that than help a man who can still be saved…why? Just because these people…they paid that ridiculous price you ask for the medicine? I suppose you must feel obligated to provide something since they obviously aren't improving."

"That's beyond your call. Your mother would be ashamed at the way you're speaking to me."

"My mother is dead. No thanks to you," she spat hatefully, then wanted to take it back. She wrapped her arms around herself, cowering under a sudden dizziness that gripped her and shook her like something in the teeth of a dog. Maybe it was just speaking that way to him. Her mother would outright cry at such insolence. "You were right before. I shouldn't have come."

"I've done everything I can with what I have. It doesn't mean it's wrong for you to do the same."

"Everything you can? Like charging three-thousand sockets a vial for a treatment that doesn't seem to do what's advertised?"

The doctor's face darkened at that. "The distillation process is extremely slow and therefore costly. I barely make anything on it, enough to fund the operation. A child such as yourself has no place making such judgments; I don't run a charity. I'm sure you forget that anything costs money at all from time to time, darling. I have to be able to pay for the clinic. I have to…take care of my family. Such is more than I expect you would have any idea about, but whatever kind of insinuation you're trying to make isn't appropriate or true. Perhaps you'd just like to blame me for what has befallen your mother…"

"How can you say such things?" With a push of breath out of her mouth, she folded her arms on the tabletop and dropped her head onto them, sitting dry-eyed and burning in her silence.

Hartia gripped his hands on the back of her chair, leaning forward on his arms. "You have something keeping you here other than these dead men."

The doctor stared a moment, seemingly confounded by the suggestion. He grimaced, but he said nothing.

"You're not staying here out of an obligation to these patients. There's something else. Something else to keep you here, I can tell it by the way you talk about it. You don't give a damn about these people, things being what they are." Hartia didn't achieve the kind of neutrality Cleo was used to hearing in his voice. Far from it. It may have been possible that she heard a little of Orphen's probably undesired influence surfacing through the almost petulant disgust in his tone. "You would've run and left them here to rot if there wasn't something tying you here."

Cleo brought her head up from the table. She watched the doctor's face, a face she'd know since she was a child. Doctor Farrior had almost been family in a way. He wasn't often so prickly and confrontational, even when he'd argued with her father from time to time—over politics mainly—rarely had she even seen the man upset in the years they'd been visiting the manor. Now, his mouth hung open indignantly, slowly forming around a carefully considered word that never came. Instead, his lip trembled.

"Is there…something wrong?"

"_Wrong_?" He exploded, his voice snagging on the way out. "Wrong! Isn't everything wrong? How…how could anything be…" He scrubbed one unbuttoned sleeve of his stock over his face, his bluster dissolving into a shudder of fear. The doctor brought a hand to his forehead and turned away, redirecting a sob into his palm.

"_Doctor_."

"Grays," he said heavily. "It's…been difficult treating him."

Wordless, she stood at the table, wobbling on her ankle. Hartia steadied her; the outline of her small shoulder lit up by amber glow from the lantern but her face was featureless in the shadows. The wooden quality of her voice painted the picture of her unseen expression, however, fairly well. "He's infected?"

Farrior coughed, removed his glasses. He stared at them a long moment before looking up in the dull lantern light. He flicked his eyes toward Hartia, still prickling behind her with his hands gripping the back of the chair, before moving them back to her.

With a grim nod, the doctor replaced his pince-nez on his nose. He blinked his watery, every-color eyes. "The same night as the fire. He wanted to go back for Enid. Wouldn't listen to me and… Ambrose was with him, fighting them off, and…"

He glanced over at Cleo, standing with her palms still anchored on the table, supporting her weight. Farrior dropped a hand on the bundle of muscle between the neck and shoulder, squeezing with his hand before he continued, his voice getting rough. "He hasn't…responded much to treatment."

"We've heard around that not a lot of people do," Hartia interjected unkindly, earning a glare from the doctor.

"Like any treatment, there are variables. Speed of treatment, location of wound. The incubation period, level of capillary permeability, viral load, organ involvement. Hell, last word I heard from the University before the world seemed to go mad—there were already emerging serotypes."

"Sero…?"

"Strains," the doctor said, dropping into a seat at the table. When he spoke, he sounded harassed. "A whole group was brought in, I heard, with a completely different method of transmission. Normally it's in open wounds…blood-to-blood or blood to infected pathogen, like saliva. The point of entry has been mostly bites. The typical immunopathic mechanism for exposure to the heterologous rhinehold serotype, so it was classified, has been a hemodynamic compromise and malfunction of bone marrow. Poor platelet production leads to consumptive coagulopathy and tissue hypoxia, eventual necrosis tracking along blood vessels as their walls degrade."

"I don't know half of what you just said…"

Farrior squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. "The point is transmission. The telegram I got from the University Hospital swore that initial examination of the group brought in from an archeological dig up north had no external wounds or points of entry, and had lung involvement. Meaning it was airborne. And if that's right…if this becomes airborne…well." Farrior wove a hand weakly. "Maybe it's better we all don't live to see it."

"_Doctor_! Please reconsider! Stephanie lives only _blocks away_ from the University. She works there, she's heading that dig site! I'm sure she could help you get Grays into the hospital there…if only you could _try_ to help Tim."

"_Brickwell_? The woman with the sick husband is…Stephanie _Brickwell_?"

Hartia sneered. "Oh perfect, now you're interested."

"I…" Farrior shook his head, looking angry to even consider it. "I can't risk moving him, not in this weather. In his state…"

"Doctor, you have a fine carriage!"

"It's not equipped for ice! What if we were waylaid? His fever _alone_ could be fatal. I won't risk it. I _can't_, Cleopatra! I've already lost Enid. I know you've lost your mother, darling, and Mariabella too. I know you're hurting. I know you want to help someone, but you can't ask me to sacrifice my loved ones to do it. The world we know isn't out there anymore. I need to look after my boy. Home is too far from here, so here it must be. At least until I can sort some things out."

As if on cue, from the dark stairwell in the corner, the one leading down into the storm cellar, there was another gurgling growl from below and a clattering of what sounded like chains. Cleo slowly sank back into her seat, repeatedly tucking her hair behind her ears in an anxious tick.

Then, behind the teeth-clenched howl, more distant, there was the more human sound of a boy crying. Outside, something was scraping the cracked front windows. Not branches. Something with mangled, numb fingers, mindlessly trying to break through toward the fragrant pull of living flesh.

Finally, staring at the table top, she spoke again, keeping her voice even. "How did it happen? How did he get bitten?"

Farrior sank against the chair backing with a grim sigh. "He wasn't. I suppose I could blame myself for his reflexes…my not having him in fencing earlier, when I should have. He was too clumsy, fighting them. Sliced himself with his own shortblade, tainted with their dirty blood. He didn't bring it to my attention right away, and…he's been terribly resistant to the antibody since we started. He already had the fever, the coughing before we even administered the first shot. Once he started to hallucinate this morning, we…had to try it full strength."

Hartia, hovering just behind the halo of light around the table, leaned in again with more coarse criticism. "You don't issue it full strength to paying customers?"

"It's _more_ than they _need_!"

The doctor gestured wildly, preparing to explain himself furiously in his spitting medical rhetoric when Hartia abruptly lost interest in him, his attention drawn with magnetic pull toward Cleo sitting marble-white with her eyes downcast and stretched wide, staring but seeing nothing. The fingertips of one milk-pale hand were held close to her agape mouth, trembling visibly over her dry lips as though she'd just been informed she'd taken poison in her tea and there was no antidote.

Hartia didn't understand it. Not at first.

ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo

To be continued…


	14. Sobriquet

**XIV: Sobriquet**

When Hartia came through the door, there was an understandable flood of questions. Not the least of which was how he'd managed to exchange what appeared to be a gravely ill young man for his previous companion, who was suspiciously missing from his company entirely. Infuriatingly, he answered none of these.

Instead, panting from the exertion of distance-translocation, Hartia towed the boy, younger than Majic by a few years at a glance, toward the sofa and deposited him. His pale hands were bound with thin, silky-looking rope, his face covered with a large handkerchief until Hartia pulled it off. He had something looped over his arm that jangled when he walked.

"Alright?"

The boy nodded, red eyed and damp-faced with tears and perspiration. He sat with his bound hands clasped in his lap, wearing a high-collared cloak over an untucked nightshirt and tweed trousers. His arm was wrapped profusely in white muslin bandage, secured around the hand in a tight knot.

Stephanie followed behind them like a ghost, muted by the appearance of the child. Something about children always made her go quiet, her eyes soft. She watched him with a melancholy interest; he was clearly unwell. He bent his head into his shoulder, wracked with a deep, barking cough that left a fine spray of red on his shirt.

Orphen was in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded so tight one was likely to snap off from the exertion, forcing patience through grinding teeth that didn't last more than a few minutes of tense silence. "The fuck is this?"

"Just a minute." Hartia was busy unloading the coil on his forearm, chains encased in loose fabric. Padded restraints. He secured them to the sofa and clicked them on the boy's wrists after undoing the ropes. The boy didn't protest, just watched with his distant stare. He barely looked up.

Impatient, Orphen circled around the sofa, watching him lock up the kid. He was slight framed, round faced with hair the silvery-brown of wet beach sand. Fourteen or fifteen. Familiar. On the edge of his vision, Hartia threw him a nervous glance, wary. Perhaps hoping to stave off the cloudburst of anger he was certainly rational enough to know was inevitable.

"This is Farrior's youngest son. Say 'hey', Grays." The boy rose a shackled hand tentatively while Hartia continued, still winded from the trip. "As you might guess, he's infected. Being treated, obviously, but Farrior wouldn't travel him through the elements. If I didn't bring him this way, he wasn't going to leave Totokanta. So here we are: Grays is safe in front of a fire, I've got a couple vials of the antibody, and Farrior should be here by sometime in the night if they ride straight through. Should be a little faster in a coach, in any case."

Orphen shifted. Grays. Of course he was familiar, he'd heard the boy's testy conversation with Cleo on the balcony above the rose garden the day he'd come back, when all of this had started. He'd been haughty and superior back then, spitting out more than one blueblood phrase that had made his flesh twitch. From the look of things, he'd fallen pretty far off his high horse to be sitting here sweating, chained and coughing blood on Stephanie's sofa. It was a thought that might have inspired a sort of smug satisfaction in him previously, but today there was nothing but annoyance with the continued lack of explanation and apology. With his back to the fire, Orphen eyed Hartia with palpable resentment while the boy watched surreptitiously through a fringe of lowered eyelashes.

"And Cleo?" Behind them, Stephanie finally remembered her voice, stepping over her own mess of nested books and dogeared reports on the floor in front of the hearth to improve her vantage point while she continued with her tiresome hand-wringing. "She's with the doctor?"

Hartia nodded, wiping his hands on the handkerchief he'd covered the boy's face with for the journey. Maybe keeping the cold off of him. "The doctor suggests if we could get into the University Hospital, there would be better equipment to work with when he gets here."

"I don't know how we'd manage that," she told him. "Things being what they are, I can assure you the gates are on absolute lockdown. Even if they weren't…"

"We'll go. Me and Krylancelo. We can move around pretty easily, long as it's still daylight its less dangerous." As he was removing his cloak, the rusty mess on the front of his gray sweater was too distracting for Orphen to continue listening, even though it had come from Tim and he'd already seen it. Something about it set his teeth on edge more than they already were.

"Less dangerous?" he intoned severely. "You saying that with a mess of blood on your shirt doesn't exactly inspire confidence, what with you volunteering me and all."

Hartia cast that same, troubled look at him with a sheen of sweat catching the light on his face and the pinch between his brows. Then he said, "You won't go?"

"Not sure I understand the point of it."

"The equipment, Krylancelo. We don't have anything proper here to treat Tim or Grays. Nothing's sterilized. We've barely got enough bandages, let alone needles. Farrior's headed up here just as much for the chance to treat his son as to help Tim. Part of the bargain is doing what we can do get into that Hospital, it's a fair trade."

Orphen grimaced, said nothing. Stephanie went about kneeling beside the sofa and offering to bring the boy some honeyed tea, which he softly accepted. She'd barely disappeared through the swinging kitchen door before Hartia had turned that hard glance back on the glowering shadow by the fire. "Where's Bagup?"

"Resting."

"Majic?"

"Watching him."

"Good," Hartia flicked a glance toward Grays, sitting in edgy silence with the fireshadows throwing his facial features into high relief. He shook and tightened his face, on the verge of obvious tears. "Before we…you mind if we talk upstairs?"

Something squirmed in Orphen's mind, perhaps just the dreamed up image of Hartia standing in the bright bedroom doorway. His guts shifted at the memory, however vague it was already becoming with the passage of the hours since he'd woken. With a noncommittal nod, he wove a hand casually forward then followed him up to the empty guest quarters, leaving the boy behind. He'd barely closed the door behind them before Hartia's hard-earned collected demeanor had entirely evaporated, replaced instead by tangible apprehension that filled the room like suffocating hot air. He folded his arms and unfolded them twice in a matter of thirty seconds while Orphen watched him with a growing sense of urgent dread, the same chill that had been stirring in his bone marrow since he'd come through the door with the stranger.

He was going to tell him something bad. He hadn't wanted Stephanie to hear it, or Majic. He'd offered no explanation for Cleo's absence other than a nod at Stephanie's prompt. _Is she with the doctor?_

There was an invisible rope tightening around his throat while he watched Hartia struggle to even look at him.

Something had happened.

Something had happened to her. To Cleo. And he was starting to grind his teeth waiting for him to say it.

When he was a heartbeat away from an explosive invective, Hartia finally got out an almost timid demand, "Let me look at your wound."

"…What?"

"Your wound. Your shoulder. I need to take a look at it. L-listen. Cleo wasn't sure I should—"

"She's alright?" He interrupted shortly. All this showboating and lip-biting and looking at the floor, and she was fine?

"Yeah, she's…I mean, it wasn't easy there for her. You knew it wouldn't be, but, she…Yeah, she's okay. She's coming up with Farrior so I could take the kid. Damn long distances. Feel like I ran a marathon, going so far with a passenger."

"So she wasn't sure you should what?"

Just like that, the anxiety returned to Hartia's face. "Wasn't sure about anything really. But…the boy down there, Grays. He…"

"Jesus, you're starting to stammer like Majic."

"He wasn't bitten," Hartia snapped, then recoiled. "He sliced himself, fighting off infected with a cutlass. The blade was wet with their blood…"

Orphen said nothing.

"Krylancelo. Your _wound_."

Orphen said nothing.

"What else had she been using that knife for? The one she attacked you with?"

Orphen, any trace of expression erased from his features, said nothing. Hartia, his voice catching on the way out of his throat, smothering a wet sound before nearly pleading.

"Let me _look_ at it."

"She didn't think you should tell me?" The voice that came out of him, standing stiffly, was almost funereal.

"She…didn't know what she wanted. She heard the story about Grays and went white. Just, totally white. When she told me—when she could get it out—she didn't want to upset you, you know, if it wasn't true. But. Wuh…we have to know. She'll understand why…" He took a step forward, gesturing with open hands for him to allow the inspection.

Orphen gracelessly reached for the hem of his shirt with hands that had taken to vibrating with sudden adrenaline. He wrestled out the shirt, standing still and letting Hartia untie the swath of bandage alternately crossing over his chest and wrapping the joint of the shoulder in the gray late afternoon light that slanted through the open shutters. He watched him roll the blood spotted gauze into a lump in his hand, slowly revealing the underlayers and then skin, the angry red edges of the massive, hastily stitched groove, the waxy black thread and the dark, bruise colored mass stretching out under the flesh, an ugly network like thick black spiderwebs that made Hartia choke aloud when he saw them. He turned away to cover his face while Orphen sunk down slowly to sit in the desk chair, watching his own shirtless reflection in the mirror over the rosewood bureau across the room.

It stared blankly at him, waiting for a reaction. But nothing happened.

He waited. Waited for that reflection to scream. To throw something or break the mirror. To dissolve into pathetic, self-obsessed tears. To shake or yell or deny everything. To feel sorrow or boiling fury.

Instead, it just stared at him, apparently waiting for the same thing. Slowly, methodically, he turned in the chair and shifted around the parchments he'd left there, swept them to the side. He folded his arms and dropped his head on them, breathing slow. He closed his eyes.

So this was what it was like. So this was how he would go. The world was losing its mind, consumed by a crawl of eldritch horror that ate flesh. Cities were burning to the ground, any semblance of society falling so quickly to primal instincts and survival morality. Most sorcerers went in a blaze of fire, explosive and glorious; they died in battle, in wars. And he was going to rot quietly away because of an infected cut he'd gotten for caring too goddamned much about someone he knew all along that he shouldn't.

Like everything else in his life, it seemed like the biggest joke in the world. He somehow never failed to do these kinds of things to himself, and he couldn't even feel a thing about it except a little dizzy, and even that was probably because he was dying. He'd been dying for hours, just thinking he was exhausted. Thinking it was the fever from the assisted healing, the cough from the smoke, all his weakness and lack of clarity to be blamed on a loss of blood and stress. Then the dream. He'd vomited until the basin was streaked with blood.

Over his shoulder, his old friend was sniffing, fighting tears and losing. For long minutes, it was all he could hear. He focused on it. It was better than the cold landscape of his own thoughts, his absolute lack of feeling that felt, somehow, no less intense than a breath-stealing, white-knuckled rage. It left his head ringing, trembling from a sudden recognition of the cold. And maybe fear. Of course fear.

"I have some of the antibody," Hartia finally snuffled, reaching to dig through the satchel he'd brought in with him. "It's full-strength, this stuff. Potent. The doctor gave me some instructions on administration and it's already been so long that...we can't wait for Farrior to get here…"

"No."

Slow and mechanical, his eyes rimmed red even in the dull gray light, Hartia brought up his head. Short of tilting it like a dog, he couldn't have looked more nonplussed. Indeed, Orphen had surprised himself by even being able to speak with his tongue and internal organs all feeling like they'd turned to stone. "What do you mean no?"

"No," he repeated tensely, barely recognizing his own voice. "I mean no. Treatment. It won't do any good now, you'll just waste it. You know it, don't you remember? All those people at the Tavern. They all had the same story. It has to start right away, or it's no good at all. Otherwise…"

He couldn't say it. That otherwise, he was already on his way to becoming one of those things. A revenant. His hourglass was already turned over, sand had been running since the moment Cleo had plunged that knife into him, horrified and blind. By the time she'd realized her mistake, thrown her arms around him, he was already as good as dead. He thought of the body beside Mariabella's, the leering undead with the flat holes sunk between his shoulderblades, the holes ringed with a spill of blood that hadn't been enough to think he'd been stabbed to death. But that was before he'd known they didn't actively bleed, that they weren't alive.

Was he alive? He was almost afraid to even check. He felt alive, but was certain that meant very little now.

Hartia glowered suddenly. "Why are you so goddamned _calm_?" He nearly shouted, his voice gummed up in his throat.

Orphen, with his head still down on his folded arms, opened his eyes. The parchment on the desktop was a blur of ink, too close to focus. He didn't know why, but he suspected the painkiller might still have been sedating him. Perhaps it was as simple as that. Or it wasn't.

"If I go out there…" he said, the words heavy falling out of his mouth, clacking to the floor like wooden blocks. He didn't even know what he was going to say before it came out. "Like you told Stephanie, toward the hospital…"

"It can't have progressed so far yet," Hartia told him, ignoring his dull protest. "There's still time—"

Orphen planted his hands on the desktop and pushed up, gesturing to his blackening shoulder, pushing air out through his teeth at the pain when he flexed it. "Couldn't have progressed far? You mean for it to look like _this_ in only a couple days? How much time have I got before I'm chewing up roadkill like a dog? Or one of you? Huh? Who's going to put a bullet in my head when that happens? Maybe you'll lock me up like that kid downstairs?" He suddenly shuddered, finally hit with a spasm of some kind of delayed emotion that was hard to unscramble. "I don't want anybody to see me like that. I don't…I don't want to go down like this…"

After a moment, his weight leaned on his hands, braced on the desktop, he dropped his head. He exhaled shakily. It was regret, that strange surge of emotion. Crippling, withering regret.

Why? Of all things. He couldn't feel anger, not even toward Cleo—and she had done this to him. She had done this and…and all he could feel was regret. Numbness and regret. No anger.

Not even toward Cleo. Especially toward Cleo. He wanted to see her.

It was the strangest feeling. The same kind of feeling he'd nursed in the dark of night over the past three months, finding himself thinking of her. Her silky wheat colored hair and pillowy lips, the blue spark in her eye and cruel half-smile she'd get in the middle of smartassing him. Her hands on her lips, chin jutted up at him. Daring him. _Daring_ him to do something but he was never certain on what. Laying in the dark, especially camp nights sleeping in the dig site in Bazilkok, all he'd really wanted was to see her. The way he did now.

Staring down at the desktop, he tremored again. Now emotion was catching up with him. Like air rushing back into a vaccum.

He was going to die, and all he could think of…was her. Like Bagup and Iris in the crashing carriage.

He tried to concentrate on the table through a burning veil gathering in his eyes, gazing dully at the pushed-around sheaf of parchment scraps and pages. His own handwriting came into wavering focus, a scrap he'd spun upside down in his attempt to clear the table top.

The romanized Om readings that he'd fretfully looked up earlier in the codex: Ure. Dnat. Urab. The Hon readings: Hol'gh. Braik. Chattur.

His eyes were frozen on them. Upside down as the paper was, the Hon readings were as nonsensical as ever. And the Om readings, upside down, turned backwards to his eyes, in his own crowded up, left-handed letters.

Baru. Tand. Eru.

Barutanderu.

Hartia was speaking, but the words didn't come through. He was too busy with the old flood of Azalie's voice, her explanations of Nornir and syllable-ending vowels, the language that couldn't be formed by a human tongue, not meant for human ears. It was modified for human enunciation. That and her stories of the arcane, little-heard lore of the immortal changeling, the lich who tricked death into passing him by with his thousand forms and the cursed island ruins rumored to be his reliquary.

He'd been a child practically, unable to grasp entirely what she'd wanted from the place. The thrill of the arcane and forbidden as only Azalie could desire. They'd recovered a sword there, a sword inscribed with pre-norric runes, spelling an obscure name she'd spent a week in the grand library trying unsuccessfully to piece together by running the phrases through Phyrric and picking through endless codices only to come up with a mouthful of unpronounceable gibberish, 216 letters of it. Less than a month later she singlehandedly destroyed her life…and his life…with that sword.

And after that Azalie, like the mythical lich sealed in his living tomb, was ever changing. Like the color of the sea at twilight, always something else.

Looking at the word, unknowingly written by his own hand, his knees gave out. So many years before, when he'd brought the tale of Azalie and the Bloody August to Stephanie, even she had never heard of the legend. The lack of appearances had led her to believe that if such an artifact existed, it was coded in epithets, the way the Nornir were known to disguise words they felt contained too much power, and wished not to invoke. Given a sobriquet.

Kind of like the name 'Orphen'.

"Kryancelo...!"

"Hu…" he wheezed, dizzied and breathless, as though winded by the weight of the long overdue epiphany being forcefully torn from him. "Hartia. Get Steph."

Hartia didn't react. He was standing close by with an uncapped syringe of the gold colored serum, its tip a preposterously long, hollow barreled needle. Trapped against the desk, with his reflexes compromised by a cocktail of chemicals and symptoms, he could barely flinch back before Hartia had lunged and buried it painfully in the bruised muscle surrounding the stitched, necrotic wound and jammed down the plunger with his thumb.

There was an entire torturous world of fire inside of that needle, a churning spout of corrosive, screaming acid that blossomed under his skin into a spreading heatwave of electric, jaw-clenching agony far exceeding anything he had knowledge of possibly existing. Orphen struggled only for the half-moment he still had control of his extremities before he went involuntarily boneless, sliding out of the chair, sucking for air beyond the black tide that was swelling around him, and every thought in his brain shrunk down to a single word before the pain stomped it out like a campfire.

The runic name on the wall in the buried Bazilkok ruin: _Baltander_.

ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo

To be continued…


	15. Inertia

**XV: Inertia**

A sun colored like molten iron was rising out the fogged quarter lights of the Farrior's brougham. It cast thin, ghostly shadows that extended miles long down the white streets, authoring strange silhouettes of the horses on the brownstone walls with legs stretched and articulated like great spiders while they lurched and screamed, jarring the carriage axels with desperate violence. She didn't dare look out again; what she could hear told her everything she needed to know. The brougham jerked, careened sideways, pitched up on the two side wheels, threatening to tip, to split open on the ice like a cracked egg, leaving her bare and unprotected. One of the animals wailed again, threw forward in crazed fear, lashed its legs out and the cart whipped down hard, wood cracked audibly and she hit the floor hard beside Ambrose. His arms wrapped her, one hand on either side of her head to press the palms over her ears, muffling out the sound of the horses and the grinding maddening howl that out from the ruined throats of things that had once been men while they snapped out mouthfuls of steaming horseflesh. At a full, blind run, the horses fled.

She should have pushed him away. She knew that. Instead she cowered, fighting tears and the primal, horrified impulse to scream as though it could help her. She betrayed herself and her own sense of reason. It seemed fitting. She had betrayed everyone else she loved, after all, beginning with Mariabella, and ending with Orphen.

_Orphen_.

The coach convulsed around them like something alive, etched windowglass vibrated, the crank axel shrieked under the clattering weight. Bracing himself on the driver's perch, she could hear the doctor hollering at the terrified animals, heaving the reins back to slow their mad, reasonless flight. Springs in the undercarriage whined at each rise in the road, if what they were following could indeed be called a road. Even as they ran, the horses cried out. They tossed wildly in their bindings, and the vehicle lurched hard, reeling the passengers forward, and after an endless stretch of long minutes, outside the doctor was yelling.

"God's wounds, Ambrose, load up a rifle and come put down this fool mare! Broken its own damned leg and kept on running."

She must have whimpered at the idea, because the young lord squeezed her gently before letting go. Haggard in his bloodstained wingcollar shirt and coat, Ambrose snapped up the gun on the leathered bench, steadying himself in the jerking sway of the slowing carriage, sliding open the front glass with a grimace of effort. Cleo clutched her own ears shut to deaden the percussion of the gunshot, wrapping herself in the peltlined cape, hiding her face while she fought against a dried out impulse for tears. Even after the jingle and clatter of Ambrose and his father unhooking the mare, she did not raise her eyes up again the rest of the halting, grinding journey with a single injured horse and splintered wheel rods.

The remaining horse, an old swayback mustang, had barely lasted until they'd arrived in south Alenhaten, stumbling for miles while towing the coupe, his great legs shaking under the weight of the pain, deep gouges broken through the blood-wet coat and running in bright rills. The sweetfaced mustang had gone down, worked to near death, likewise the horses from the Everlasting stables—left tied to the hitches outside—had been gnawed, their hulking ice-dusted corpses having bled out in the snow, left sitting half-eaten in a welter of gore. She was certain that, once she was inside, the doctor had shot the old gelding as well.

Since then, since rushing inside Stephanie's home on numb feet, everything was wet paint, every thought and action and sense of time ran together like watercolors. Shadows and light, no borders; sfumato. She remembered the term from renaissance art studies, generally useless as they had been. The oddest things were surging up from dormant memory the longer she sat, silent and staring, trying not to think at all. Things forgotten out of disuse, others forgotten intentionally. Conjugations of verbs in Old Basque, a quarrel over hair ribbons with a playmate long past, math equations, lyrics to songs, names of spiders and constellations in the southern sky.

She'd taken up residence by an open plantation shutter with a cup of tea, now cold, and a quilt cocooned around her, not bringing warmth as much as a strange, quiet companionship; a sympathetic, inanimate embrace. Even in the queer windless silence, she kept thinking of the horses and their screaming, but no tears came. Instead everything had grown very still and dark inside her, like the sun had set but the stars had yet to come out, and everything about her was lost. It had crossed her mind to ask Dr. Farrior if it was possible for grief to kill. She was gaining certainty that hers was swiftly tightening, strangling her life from her.

Maybe it was no better than she deserved. She should have _known_ it. She should have been able to see. If she hadn't been so embroiled in her own misery, everything drowned out by the blare of her own deafening self-pity, she would have known. Would have seen it in his increasingly peculiar behavior. Almost more than how she'd unknowingly infected him, she hated herself for missing it. His fever, for god's sake! She'd felt it for herself, pressed her face against his and he'd allowed it. Not long after, he'd kissed her.

Her mind inexplicably kept jumping back to the muffled gunshot; the screaming of the mare with the broken leg, covered in bite wounds, crazed. Doomed.

Ambrose, sitting by the fire with his rifle in reach, shifted his watch between his stricken brother imprisoned on the davenport, and Cleo, mourning by the window. He didn't try to speak to her any further. Really, he'd said more than enough already when she'd twisted the diamond bauble from her finger and returned it in the dark cellar of his father's ruined clinic. The way he'd stared at it, she almost may have felt sorry for him if he hadn't followed that with storming up the stairs in anger as though he'd forgotten all her previous objections. Throughout the journey north to Alenhaten, her second in days, he had alternately offered sympathetic words of comfort and bitterly questioned her. After awhile, she had stopped responding at all.

Upstairs, a door clicked shut and footsteps crossed the catwalk toward the landing. Stephanie followed the Doctor downstairs, heading toward her while the old man went to tend to Grays. She dropped to sit in the windowseat beside her, pulling her legs up to tuck her stocking feet under her. With her chin resting on her knee, she stared out the window at the featureless ice for a long moment before speaking under her breath, exhausted.

"He's still out. Tim too."

With her bottom lip between her teeth, she pulled in a breath and held it, then let it out slowly, turned her eyes up at the woman.

"He'll wake up. But I don't think he needs to hear that you're sorry, if that's what you're planning to tell him." Stephanie sat on the windowseat beside her, catching her cold hand between hers and dropping her voice. "Cleo, honey, you didn't know this could happen. Even if you _did_—you were just protecting yourself. After what you'd seen? No one can blame you for a thing. Orphen would tell you the same if he could."

"No…that's not…" She pulled the quilt tighter around her arms, licking her dry lips, thinking about those words 'if he could'. Because he couldn't. He couldn't do anything now, not even wake up. "Of course I'm sorry. Of course I didn't. I didn't _know_. It didn't…it didn't ever even cross my mind. But I should have seen that something was wrong."

"Cleo, how could you have known that? _Everything_ is wrong," she nearly laughed at the frightening absurdity of it, tears pinching her words. "Everything in the whole world is wrong. You're expecting too much out of yourself. You weren't the only one who could have put the pieces together and didn't."

She nodded vaguely, dragged a sleeve over her dry eyes almost out of habit. "Do you think I could go up anyway? I mean, even if he's not awake…"

With a nod, Stephanie reached around her, smoothing her hair fondly with a tiny pucker of a furrow on her forehead. "Of course, once the doctor's seen to him."

With a glance toward the Farriors, she let out a lungful of air. Even while the Doctor helped Grays sit up on the sofa and began to methodically unwind his cocoon of arm bandages, Ambrose's eyes hadn't left her.

ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo

Somehow, it was always the sea. Chalkstone crags white against a pale blue sky. A stretch of sand, gray and featureless lay flat along iron blue water. In the distance, a red and white house on a rocky white knoll, roof scalloped with shale and lined with a widow's walk. Behind it, the sun, burning white and small, the shadows so long and thin even pebbles drew dark threads across the damp winter sand. Far down the coast, just on the rim of earshot, a woman in a blue dress. Children, their calls echoless and ringing in the immense, open stretch. He stood on the beach a long time, it felt like days, watching the high up pale specks of seabirds, listening to the surf changing. The woman never came to speak to him. He couldn't find his voice. He sat in the sand until the sun vanished into the hills, until there was only dark and the sound of the sea. The low rumble of high tide crashing in, deeper than thunder, hollow and cavernous like stone rolling deep within the ground. And hidden there, under that sound, a different kind of thunder. The sound the planet would make if it could breathe, if it could speak and punish. A voice out of mind, of age and malice. It was calling him.

When the first threads of light finally reached him, secluded and forgotten at the bottom of a black ocean of sleep, it felt bizarrely as though he had missed centuries. It was an incomprehensible certainty, as though an entire era of civilization had perceptibly passed while he'd lain comatose, children having been born, grown old and died while he'd slept. That everybody who had ever lived had long passed. He struggled into wakefulness, blinking languidly at the liquid flux of moving shadows and light that formed the horror of the new, unfamiliar world.

Perhaps he had been dreaming, was still half-remembering something he'd only happened upon the tail end of, a feverish fantasy he'd suffered in the deep, lightless trench of his consciousness. Still, it was a perverse grip of dread that clung to him as he swum upward, heavy-limbed, through the last few leagues of sleep before the ceiling above the bed came into slow, wavering focus.

He was lying in damp sheets, simultaneously cold and hot, and he shifted weakly against the discomfort, unable to escape it. Efforts invested in something so simple as attempting to turn his head produced little movement, just a twitch of muscle that felt like trying to bench press a continent. His throat burned, head echoing the thunder of a far-off, clouded-over headache. That and the pulsing ache in his shoulder were queerly absent in a way they still left a shadow. Not gone, simply removed from the picture, leaving a sharp negative almost as tangible as the pain itself.

But how he'd come to be here, where here was…those weren't things immediately apparent, hidden in the bog of his brain.

Somebody had kept a fire stoked. The ceiling shone amber with the light from a blaze in the stone hearth off to his right, and when he craned his head, in an armchair by the hearth, a blond young man slept with his head dropped forward on his chest. He had an urge to call out to the boy. Before he could attempt it, could even test his voice, the door opened and a hollow pair of footsteps came through it, carrying with them a man who spoke in a hush and a tired looking woman with heavy hornrimmed glasses and a ragged topknot of dark hair. If his head had been more clear, he might have had a name for that face.

"Yes, it's a treatment in that, if introduced to the system early, it helps build defense against the infectant, particularly from blood vessel permeability, which ultimately protects the bone marrow. Some of those treated have gone on to continue fighting, their immune systems having been boosted by the antibody. In some cases, the boy's father for example, recovery seems promising. Others," the man paused pointedly when they came over the bed, "aren't going to be quite as lucky, unfortunately."

"Tim hasn't wakened yet either." The woman's voice was rough, and through a veil of his eyelashes, he watched her turn an angry glance on the man who was preparing a syringe with a tiny needle on its end. The doctor. Doctor…something. He couldn't get his eyes open enough to get a good look at him. He didn't seem familiar. Not in the way the boy did. Or the woman.

"It's not a matter of who has and who hasn't awakened, Mrs. Brickwell. Infection is already a monumental task for the immune system, being bombarded with foreign antibodies distilled externally is wholly another. In this one's case, his infection is already advanced. There's only so much the treatment can do at this point. Even if he's a sorcerer, it's just postponing…"

"Stop calling it a treatment if it's not a treatment. If it can't _do_ anything!"

"It can and does. It's not a cure, if that's what you were expecting me to bring here, I can safely agree that it does not indeed kill the infection."

"I was expecting something more than a glorified vitamin shot!"

The doctor hushed her, bringing up his hand as though to remind her they were in the room of a patient. "The antibodies are distilled from the blood serum of those who become infected without developing the disease, just how any inoculation is primed. The fact that we've isolated any kind of protein that stimulates defensive compounds against such a complex mechanism is nothing short of remarkable on this timeline. It's unfortunate you can't recognize that, I had heard you were an admirer of the sciences."

"I'm not an admirer of men who take advantage of misfortune to charge such exorbitant prices for something that cannot truly save their dying loved ones," the woman all but hissed. "Who allow rumors to spread that it is something it's not!"

"Your husband is being treated with all signs of possible success," the doctor said neutrally. Husband? Were they talking about him? Was this his _wife_? "I understand your stress; you've seen my son downstairs. I shouldn't think your speaking to me this way is what you really intend." The man set down the syringe on the bedside table, picking up a glass bottle and uncorking it with a squeak before taking up the needle and filling it from the vial, then connecting it to the tubing that laced overhead. He hadn't noticed it before; it was going into his arm. It was only a few seconds before his mind was muddy again, the dark water of forgetfulness rising around him.

"It's extremely costly and slow to distill, and to make matters worse it's highly perishable. The cost of it had to fund the operation of trying to supply areas with treatment. As it is, once we've gone through the supply we have of it…" The doctor sighed, drawing the back of his hand over his forehead, sounding a little breathless when he spoke. "Believe me. I've seen the piles of dead. I've seen the horrific final stages of this infection. If you were me, Mrs. Brickwell, wouldn't you seek to do something to help? If you could, I mean. I've sunk a good portion of my family's assets into the development of this antibody. Staked everything I have on it and more. If it's administered early, it can prevent…well, what you saw out there, last night."

"What I saw," the woman said, removing her glasses. She pressed the flat of her fingers into her closed eyes. "I don't want to discuss it."

"I suppose it's not the optimal time to remind you…but you haven't answered my question about funding from the university."

"I'm not familiar with what kinds of requirements they have to consider such a project," the woman, Mrs. Brickwell, looked emaciated and exhausted. She cast a look toward him, almost as through aware he'd grown lucid enough to listen. He just couldn't open his eyes sufficiently to signal her; couldn't work his tongue to speak or even spit. In fact, he seemed less capable of movement now than he had before they'd entered the room. Before the bottle and the little needle. "Archeology projects take years to get off the ground with funding, I know that much. You'll still have to speak with Rowe."

"Surely the urgency of the situation my research seeks to address might expedite the process? After all, what could be of more import—"

"If the staff is accessible, I'd expect you might be correct. Doctor Farrior, getting to the University safely, at this point, after…" the woman choked slightly. "I don't know if we can make it there. Especially not with this man here incapacitated."

The doctor's lip curled vaguely; the woman didn't see. "We've made it this far. I have every intention of getting to the University Hospital. Our materials for treatment are increasingly insufficient. The cold…slows them down. The temperature and weather remain to our advantage, and I don't intend to waste the opportunity. Even if I must go on foot. The redheaded young man, he said he would accompany me, and Ambrose is skilled with a rifle."

The name _Ambrose_ sent a cold crawl of something unpleasant down the bedridden man's cramped spine, the thrum of malevolence pulsing in the deep of him. Even if he wanted to react somehow, the godforsaken chemical he'd just been fed seemed intent on silencing him. It was increasingly difficult to breathe; his heartbeat was warning him of it, becoming violent in his chest.

"I'm not altogether sure that's enough. When Tim came through town—"

"But your husband was alone when he was bitten, was he not?" Finally, the doctor was unwinding the stethoscope from his pocket, inserting it slowly into his ears, pressing the cold metal pad against his breastplate. Surely he would hear that he was in distress. With immense effort, he made a fist around a cold, damp handful of the topsheet. He squeezed it with every piddling ounce of strength he had, until he could feel it tremble.

After a long listen to the labored mechanizations of his heart, the doctor calmly removed the pad. He said nothing while he turned to the woman, who was attending gently to the sleeping boy, easing him backward into the chair to relieve his craned-forward neck. While she was occupied, the doctor's hands reached again for the bottle on the side table. He uncorked it quietly and unsecured the needle from the tubing with calm, purposeful fingers, working with a smooth, deliberate speed. He threw a glance over his shoulder to where she was covering the boy with a lap blanket.

If he could shout, he would have. Instead, through the hazy slice of vision he could maintain, he watched the doctor draw another small dose of the clear liquid from the glass bottle and insert it into the intravenous tube, and the liquid screamed through his blood like a pack of howling chemical dogs. If he could move, he would have flinched. Would have cried out in the panicked fear he felt filling his lungs, wringing oxygen and reason from him. While he corked the vial, the doctor seemed to look him directly in the eye, watching the wet gleam of panic dwindle and dull while his clenched fist slowly released.

ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo

It was long hours before she could muster the required bravado to go upstairs. Even after the doctor had left him, after Majic had gone up, after he had come back down. With legs frozen under her, she the daylight watching the stair landing, turned to stone by trepidation. By heart-stomping guilt.

She shut the bedroom door softly behind her, pushing it closed with both hands and facing it, still afraid to turn and see everything for herself. She'd known the truth the moment the doctor had told described the unfortunate way Grays had become infected, and had barely held herself together getting the story out to Hartia. He'd looked almost as devastated at the news as she'd felt. According to Stephanie, once he'd helped her get Orphen into bed, he'd slipped off to rest in the guest bedroom and had remained there since. Everyone had their own way of dealing with grief. How she dealt with it, she wasn't sure anymore. When her father had died, her way of dealing with it was that she'd spent weeks in glorious isolation at the Institute over the holiday, avoiding anything and anyone who might remind her of the real world. Queen of her own frozen, silent kingdom. In her own way, running around with Majic and Orphen, that's what she'd been doing ever since.

Cleopatra, gypsy queen of the open road. She'd been pretending she was useful, needed, even _wanted_.

Pretending that this was her world and she just allowed everyone else to exist in it, waking up every day and waiting for something to happen that could take her further away from the ugly truth. It had made her shortsighted, reliant on everyone else. Weak. Her mother had allowed it, or rather just neglected to care enough until it grew into an inconvenience.

_Inconvenience_. Because that's what she was to everybody that knew her. An impatient, complaining, ineffectual inconvenience, just sleepwalking through her own life. Being carried by the tide of refusal, following the inertia of fortune so long as it took her far away.

Approaching the bed in the dim red firelight, she remembered to breathe but little else. The body under the sheets didn't move, didn't sit up. It showed no signs of being aware of her approach at all, which made everything worse. He looked waxen, buttermilk sallow with even his lips faded pale, his dark hair wet around his face and his stitched-shut, necrotizing wound unbandaged for treatment. His wrists were both restrained with ropes made from knotted cloth, his hands laying limp with one a loose fist around a handful of topsheet. An intravenous feed was pierced into the veins of his right arm, taped in place so it didn't slide out. The tubes were laced over the headboard, funneling a goldish-clear liquid slowly down from a glass ampoule hung from the bedknob.

And just when it felt like she should cry, nothing came. Only a dry, hot, echoing sense of emptiness. She wanted to jostle him, wanted him to wake up and shrug it all off the way he did everything. She wanted him to scowl at her and tell her it looked worse than it was, his typical annoyance when she showed more concern than he felt was warranted, which was usually any concern at all. But he wouldn't do these things, not laying there white-pale and unresponsive, one foot in the grave already. Not this time, not maybe ever again. She had a terrible habit of believing he was some sort of superhuman. As though being a sorcerer negated his being vulnerable to the same things anybody else was: pain, injury, illness. Even though she'd seen him injured, nearly killed, and still went on believing it just the same.

She'd just never seen him sick. He never even got a cold. How could he be laying there, dying?

Still there were no tears. Just that howling empty depth, like a dry well tunneled far into the earth to where there was no sound or air, where light couldn't reach. She reached down to lay her fingertips on his arm, pressing them gently against the hot, sweat-damp skin. He didn't stir, his chest barely rose when he took a breath. The wound stretching over his shoulder was green-black around its edges, the branches of the veins and arteries below were already traced with the unhealthy color like dark lace on his skin, already beginning to creep down the inside of his bicep.

When she was reaching for his hand, the bedroom door quietly clicked open behind her. To turn immediately, she thought, would make her look strangely guilty of something. When she did glance back, it was Ambrose with his arms crossed tight over an unbuttoned brocade waistcoat, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. One corner of his mouth was drawn up in a familiar kind of bland irritation, his eyes as shadowed and tired as anyone else's.

"I was starting to think you wouldn't come up here at all."

She just looked at him. With a tired slump, he pushed off the doorframe to move closer, and she watched his eyes jerk from her to the bed for a long moment, then back. "I'm assuming this is who I have to thank for your continued reluctance to accept what is already done?"

"Nothing is done," she told him, her voice low. "There are more important things for me to worry about."

"More important? Your mother is gone now, I can't imagine what you think is more important than securing the longevity of her legacy. And your father's, for that matter. Everything they worked so hard for, you're just going to let it sit and rot?"

"I can take care of it myself. At my leisure, I'll have you know."

Ambrose let out a sigh. "Don't do this. Your ideals of marriage are those of a child. You're going to throw yourself headlong into ruin, those bankers your mother had licking her ankles will eat you alive. Those men know a gentlewoman has no business in finance, but with no options your mother had venture that vulgarity. With everything that's happened, more than ever it's the most logical choice you can make to save yourself her own unhappy strain. Marriage is an alliance, Cleo, a business arrangement, and you nee—"

"Shut up! You sound like my mother. I can't hear it."

"At least one of us does. I won't let you do this. Even though the contracts burned…if you've not forgotten, I've lost my mother as well. I know your grief; it could not hurt you to be more kindly toward me."

"Your mother is dead because she stayed behind to draw up a contract for my future while you stomped back home with your father to calm yourself out of your fit when I refused to personally accept the arrangement? Perhaps you feel responsible for it." In the pit of her stomach, there was a cruel satisfaction in saying it. Revoltingly, it only got stronger when his face registered the most wounded expression he was capable of making.

"Your ungainly tongue has always been your biggest blemish. Mariabella knew how to hold hers beautifully. It's such a shame about your sister."

Now she was chewing on the inside of her cheek, biting until she tasted a tang of blood, her fingers quaking at her sides. Still, where she would have expected tears, there were none. "No one knows it more than me."

"My family has been connected with yours for too long for us to just allow you to destroy everything your bloodline has built. We owe a bigger debt of loyalty than that. If you were less of a child, you would be of this same mind. It is the failing of your mother that she has not risen you up properly since Margrave's death." He sneered at her through his lingering bitterness. "Now with everything that is happening…now far more than it was before, this alliance is paramount to the continuation of the Everlasting estate and my father's title. You'll throw it all to the wind because you have stirrings for this _eastern swine_? And a bloody warlock besides! Lord, did you search for the lowest born man imaginable just to upset your mother?" He almost laughed the last part out, and she choked around a swell of toxic insults welling at the base of her tongue.

She should have spat that his anger should have been directed at the fast dwindling assets the Farriors had to their well-heeled name. She should have smoothly reminded him that her stirrings could not be made a part of his father's inked up business arrangement or that if he had such respect for her mother's opinions on acceptable suitors, it might interest him to know how reluctant she'd been to accept Farrior's offer herself. Instead, she bared her teeth at him. "You wouldn't know a damned thing about it."

Now Ambrose did laugh, just a little. "No, Cleo, I suppose not. Because it doesn't make any sense to me, not in the least. I think your mind is anything but clear, especially not with your street urchin infatuation laying here diseased, if he wasn't already. You'll give it some more time, but not so much that you think everything is forgotten. By then, we can hope some of this bedlam will have resolved itself and we will return to making our arrangements." He turned back toward the door, his gait quickened by tamped down indignant anger once again. In the doorframe, he turned back with a storm in his eyes, distaste twisting his cupid's bow mouth. "Although I suppose with some alterations, unfortunately. From the look of him, I can see I would be ignorant to think you should have need of a _white_ gown."

When he shut the door, she wanted to scream but did nothing. With her hands fisted tight, nails pressing painfully into her soft palms, she swallowed hard against the drought in her throat. She would launch out after him in a furious tempest if only her knees weren't vibrating under her in abject humiliation at her integrity being so crudely dismissed, and hypocritically, because he was wrong.

A voice behind her, as dry and brittle as dead leaves, made her forget it all.

"Nice guy," it said from the bed; a pale, feeble imposter of its usual razortongued grandeur, "If you don't marry him, I'm going to."

She spun, nearly running to embrace him but instead sitting softly on the edge of the mattress, bowing forward across his torso, resting her cheek flat on his chest before her brain synapses even had time to fire up and examine her judgment. He brought up his arms very slowly, as though in pain or still mostly asleep, but when he moved to close them over her, they stopped, halted by the tightly knotted restraints, unable to reach.

ooo…ooo..ooo…ooo

_To be continued…_


	16. Delirium

**XVI**: **Delirium**

Falling into step with him was second nature, she didn't even have to think about it.

Her runaway mouth was something her mother had warned her about, over and over the same as telling her to sit up straight, not to put her elbows on the table. Reminding her to spoon soup away from herself. Not to walk so rapidly. Most of all it was to hold her unaccountably sharp tongue that was not fitting of a well bred lady. Her manner of speech was only one among many things her mother had been mortified to consider, not the least of which her travelling unaided with men, one of whom she deemed unspeakably vulgar and not without reason. She had forbade her travels more times than she could count, but had done little to truly bar her departures. It was no wonder Ambrose had heard something of her unsavory travelling companion prior to seeing him already half in the grave and had failed to call on his gentlemanly manners that would have him not speak ill of another in front of a lady. It was not the first time Ambrose had let his breeding buckle under the weight of his indignant temper, something she found abhorrent. Peculiar, since if she had ever seen Orphen focus on her with any kind of emotion at all—him always so settled into his endless repertoire of frigid glares and cruel smirks—it was when he was gorgeously angry, that entrancing eruption like brushfire sending sparks spiraling up to a summer sky or frayed wires of white lightning stretching down toward the horizon with furious majesty.

She'd cultivated the art of pushing that button as often as possible. When done right, it had a hair trigger. The right comment dropped casually would hit like an artillery shell. Too often, he would do the same to her. It was their version of conversation that passed for communication.

"Tough luck," she whispered finally, listening to the thready rhythm of his heartbeat rushing under her ear. He wasn't angry now; not the breathtaking force of nature she always, maybe foolishly expected him to be, full of fire and thunder. "He has his own opinions of you dirty easterners."

"So I gathered."

"Maybe you can win him over with that charming personality of yours." She was lightheaded from the storm bubbling in her; residual outrage running headlong into a cold front. Then there was embarrassment. And the guilt. Inside it roiled, and still she reached for his hand, the wrist hanging in a clothrope noose near his wounded shoulder.

"Never worked before," he said, his words slow and grim, the dull shine of his glassy eyes flickered under the black fringe of eyelashes.

Licking her dry lips, she took a breath and drew back to reply when he craned his head away from her, stricken and coughing deeply, all his wiry, hard-edged muscle drawing up tense, hand going tight around hers in whiteknuckled pain, leaving him panting in the paroxysm's wake.

"I'll get the doctor." Before she could draw away, his hand gripped her, tugging her down.

"_No_."

"You need the _doctor_," she insisted, watching his eyes, their mahogany color ink black and flat, looking deep in their sockets where they were pooled with plum colored shadow. He fought to prop himself up on an elbow and failed, sinking back into the pillows, bound and looking more and more like a chained animal.

"I'm not staying here, letting that…tranquilize me 'til I stop breathing."

"Staying? What?—what are you talking about?" She reached to lay a palm on his forehead, but he flinched away from it, skittish as a deer.

In slow motion, he turned his head on the pillow. He struggled to focus on a small bottle on the bedside table, a vial of clear grain morphine. He was silent again, examining the intravenous pinned into his arm, his eyes dropped closed on a long sigh. "I don't…want them wasting all this…on me if it can't help. Just…let me wake up…"

"You don't know it can't help," she clenched her hands. "There's no way to know. We have to do everything."

"No more morphine." He coughed again, twisting away from her, left wheezing when he was finished. "Laying here stupid and nauseated isn't helping any. It fucks my head up. It's just making everything worse. I'm not going to lie on my goddamn back and just wait to die."

She took his hand in hers again, pressed it to her cheek. It felt hot enough to melt wax. She tried to argue, but nothing came out. Finally, what did come out, it was meant to be an apology, but turned into the tears she'd been waiting on for hours. So here they were. They'd been waiting on this.

The words tangled in her throat, came out as a half-swallowed sob. With frustration in his tired, withered voice, he told her to stop it.

"_You_ stop it," she blurted, nonsensical, as though he could stop anything. "_I_ did this to you. Please, don't tell me not to cry."

His features were vague, blurred by her tears and the weak light. He seemed to have deflated, all his mounting frustration abandoned in nothing like the eruption of furious nature she always half expected at any given moment. Instead he closed his eyes, looking diminished and suddenly far more miserable at her words than he'd seemed at the prospect of dying. He lay silent for long enough she thought perhaps he'd fallen asleep, lost his tenuous consciousness. When he did speak, he could barely have sounded less like himself. "Untie these things."

A whir of wind outside, a pop of burning pine in the stone fireplace. Cleo pressed her lips into a thin line, holding them tight. She sniffed, intending to explain all the reasons why the bindings were necessary and instead found her fingernails prying carefully at each tight cloth knot until they loosened and he came unbound, his arms levering him up just enough to close them around her.

And there was nothing else. Since the fire, even while crushed by the gravity of the only foreseeable future, the only moments she had felt normal, happy even, were when his arms had been wrapped around her. Since the fire, perhaps even before. He'd left abruptly those months before, his farewell made brusque by whatever fight they'd been having at the time, and upon the news that he would be absent, she'd thrown better judgment and her mother's etiquette rules out the window and embraced him. It was warm, windy, her hair thrown around them in the sundrenched air and, stiffly, he'd returned the gesture, however brief.

Empty months had followed, days filled with her mother's contracts and bankers and Mariabella's new fascination with horse breeding. Then the Farriors and their unwelcome proposal. She'd unloaded it all on Majic, finding her way to the Lodge almost daily to sob and spit curses at her mother, to mourn the death sentence of her freedom. By the time Orphen had shown up in the rose garden she'd spent days in a thick blur of cordial liquor, perpetually sick to her stomach with her head aching and eyes burning. In the garden, she'd wanted to throw herself into his arms and beg him to take her away from all of it. Because that was what she always did: use him to run in every way that was possible. Instead, they'd fought and she'd chased him away to the Lodge to, of all things, wait for her. He didn't even need her and she'd asked him to _wait_.

If she hadn't, if she'd just gone with him as he'd _asked_, things would be so different. God knew why he waited. Why he'd ever allowed her to inconvenience him in the first place but she'd never asked. It wasn't something they talked about. There were a lot of things they never talked about, and if she'd ever learn to listen, to sometimes follow instead of fight like a petulant child, it would still be too late for anything to change. She'd been crying for weeks, about one thing or another. First because she hated her mother. Then because she wanted her back; wanted everything back including all the horrible things she'd said. All she ever did was contradict herself at her leisure. And all crying had done for her was precipitate more reasons for anguish. She wouldn't cry anymore. She couldn't. With her arms trapped up against him, his skin sunburn hot and fingers trailing through the hair that draped down her back, she just wanted to ask for forgiveness for ever even dragging him into the deathtrap of knowing her.

Before the thought could take verbal form, before she'd even gotten a word out, a high airless scream erupted downstairs, like something choking, fighting for breath. It sent them both fighting to their feet, Orphen following her out onto the catwalk that overlooked the great room, its expanse of stone and exposed beams bright with firelight, throwing exaggerated shadows thrashing on the walls. Below, bound in his makeshift sickbed and creased bedgown, Grays Farrior was screaming open mouthed, arching his back under him like a bridge, twisting, screaming and screaming until his voice skipped, shredded, became more animal than human, a raw sound like the needful cry of an infant. Cleo gripped the banister, watching the bustle of panic clustering around the sofa, Majic and Ambrose charged with further restraining the boy. One of them slipped a rolled washcloth into his mouth, either to bite or just to muffle out his mind-numbing wail. The doctor was shoveling through the contents of his bag, his face shining with sweat while he withdrew an ampoule filled with a peridot green fluid, holding it carefully up to the fire to read the label before drawing a syringe and measuring out, expertly administering a dose that silenced his hallucinating son, sending him wilting, dropping slowly back into a narcotic sleep with all ears still whining high echoing imitations of the boy's screaming.

Behind her, Orphen was backed up against the wall, watching with his eyes shifting anxiously, distracted by the fire shadows, breathing brokenly, running with sweat. He stared a long while, his expression wooden, indecipherable. "That kid," he said finally, thickly. "What's happening to him?"

"…his father is giving him the antibody full strength," Cleo watched the hospital bustle downstairs, her mouth twisting. "There are side effects."

"Side effects?"

She nodded vacantly at him. "Nightmares. Hallucinations. Delirium. The doctor said he'd need to be sedated if…you know, if he experienced any side effects. It's why they have a diluted version that they usually give more gradually, like they did with Bagup. It's also, I guess, why the treatment doesn't always work so well for everyone."

"Treatment?" he repeated blandly. "Sounds like it just makes everything worse."

Another sad nod, a tentative barefooted step toward him, away from the banister and the scene below. Without reservation, perhaps for the first time, she reached for him. "It hasn't happened to you."

With his shoulders tight under the yolk of her enfolding arms, he cast a glance back into the dim bedroom, at the rubber coil of the intravenous tube he'd slid from his arm before exiting the bed. She was right. It hadn't.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

Well after midnight, Stephanie's study door eased open and Orphen appeared behind it with a leaf of crumpled parchment gripped in one hand, creeping in quietly as though unsure what he'd find inside. In front of the fire, Stephanie was nested in a stacked henge of books and paper, and she straightened before turning on one knee, her initial aggravation dissolving when she recognized her visitor.

"How long have you been awake?" She surveyed him visibly, no doubt thrown off to find him completely dressed; gauging his lucidity. The threat he might pose.

He didn't answer right away. Then, quietly, "I don't know. Awhile."

"How…are you feeling?"

That earned one of his famous doomed smirks that only used one side of his mouth. He closed the door in silent slow motion behind him, extending the parchment toward her. "All things considered…"

Stephanie's gaze followed his hand with a vague flare of irritation before taking it, spending a minute readjusting her seat on the floor before turning her attention to it. "More rune readings? I've been through this already…"

"Turn it over and hold it up to the fire or something. I looked at it upside down, just by accident. Humor me, if you don't mind. Tell me what you think that might say."

She did. For a long minute, she stared at the ghost of the ink showing through the leaflet, then flipped it, rotated it and stared at it hard before lifting her eyes back to him with an almost blank expression. "The om readings? Inverted?" She dropped her eyes back to the paper heavily as through she'd read it incorrectly. She flipped it and brought it to the fire again. "Are you sure these are right?"

"Jesus. I got them from your goddamn codex. What's that say?"

For a long, strange minute, she said nothing. She examined the paper, examined him, then back to the paper. Her face grew more unreadable with the passing, excruciating seconds.

"Well—?"

"Baltander. Yes. It says Baltander, Orphen. Why does it say _Baltander_?" She half-crumpled the paper in her hands, overcome with what seemed like sudden fury. "That doesn't make... It doesn't make any sense at all, it's just a coincidence. Why didn't you tell me about this?"

Her mixed reaction threw him a bit, and he blinked at her, answering in a low, wooden tone. "Oh, I don't know. Slipped my mind, I guess."

Stephanie, swept away in a flash flood of her own thoughts, just stared at the paper.

"I remember talking about it with you, had to be years ago now, I guess. The story about the lich. Azalie's story went that the Nornir summoned a demon. Some kind of master of death."

"Baltander the Shapeless," she said, still not looking up while she recited robotically. "While he walked the earth, all around withered and endured in living death."

"Gris Cygnus?"

"No. Gris Cygnus is from a completely different story…"

"And what happened to him?"

Exasperated, Stephanie sighed hard. "Baltander? According to the few mentions of the story I remember finding, he was shut away. Incarcerated somehow. The Nornir called him a lich, suspecting he could never die because he had borne his psyche into a relic, something they called a phylactery. They stripped him of everything, and—never dying—he was sealed away with his reliquary hidden from memory."

"Azalie's island. The sword is probably the ph…phl…whatever."

"Phylactery." Stephanie shook her head vaguely, looking so worn down she might have dissolved into tears before a sudden change that had her looking almost angry again. Anxiety was taking her apart, robbing her of her cool, collected reason. "What, then? What are you trying to say?"

"The ruins in Bazilkok," he said, sitting on the arm of the leather settee, all of it warm from the roaring fire. "People started getting sick around the same time the excavation began. You've already said, all that writing is blasphemous. It shouldn't be there, not in a temple. Not in a holy place. And then _that_, inverted, on the wall above it. The closed rectory. Everyone who opened it, what happened to them?"

"Like we talked about before, it's looking more and like it's not a temple at all. Maybe more like a tomb."

"Or a prison?"

Stephanie just stared, her tired eyes gone soft focus. "You're delirious," she whispered. "The fever is getting to you."

"You said the Nornir were punished by their Gods for sharing the gift of sorcery. Didn't you say that? Their punishment was the Gris Cygnus, the sickness that supposedly wiped them out. They tweak the names of things in records, give them, you know…sobriquets. Other ways of referring to them. The Nornir were obsessed with words, the power of words. Any sorcerer is mindful of that. You've said all of this!"

"You want to say that Baltander was the punishment. What, that he brought the plague?"

"Or he was the plague. While he walked the earth…whatever you said. Living death. Necromancy. I said it days ago to begin with, this _fits_. It fits so much more than all this shit about viruses and—"

"Orphen…" passing her hands over her face, she deflated, emptied her lungs slowly in exasperated, irritated exhaustion. "I think you're talking crazy."

"I think it's the best lead we've got on any of this."

"You're desperate to do something. I know you, Orphen, you can't stand not having control but there's no control to be had right now. Good lord, look at you! What do you think you can do now? And why?"

"I think if I'm already as good as dead, going in there isn't going to hurt anything."

"Going _in_ there? You're _not_ as good as dead!"

"Keep your _voice_ down," he hissed. "You can't deny you've been worried the excavation has had something to do with this all along. I know because I sure as shit have. It's not a secret. Not to anyone. But I find a good reason to investigate and now _I'm_ delirious, that's funny, Steph."

"You can't just wait for the treatment to—?"

Now he snorted, shoved a handful of overlong, damp hair off his forehead. "Yeah, sure, treatment. That horse piss isn't the same thing Hartia plugged me with, I'm awake enough now to tell you that."

"Good _god_." If she believed him or not, with her ramped up frustration, it was impossible to tell. "And what's that supposed to mean?"

"Don't be willfully stupid. You've heard it all before. Treatment has to start immediately to be worthwhile. I've been like this for, what, two days? Let's not all pretend the doctor would waste this stuff on somebody it can't help, if it ever even helps anybody. Not when it's so hard to come by. I knew that back in Totokanta, all those people out for the guy's head, saying they paid him a few thousand sockets and there was no improvement, nothing at all, just a piled up death-cart in the square, a lot of broken up mothers dragging around looking for somebody to blame. All those poor people who couldn't pay for it right away, they had to sell their oxen or jewelry to pay for it. A couple days maybe, but by then, they're worm food. All that, you and think I'm making it out of this?"

"You've…" Stephanie swallowed convulsively. She took off her glasses. "But…"

"I don't know. What I do know is that, the first shot, what Hartia had…it dropped me. It felt like…shit, I can't even describe it. Then there was that IV, it felt like…just like nothing, I guess. Not the same, not at all the fucking same. Once I slept off all that morphine he was giving me, I don't feel a thing. That kid is in there driven to batshit insanity by this stuff, and here I am walking around. The only thing that's the same about the way he's being treated is all the dope."

"You think he was keeping you asleep? Orphen, you don't know that. And…even if he was…"

"I saw him. Steph, I saw him double-dosing me, when I woke up, earlier. I don't know when. I was too out of it to make any sense or talk or anything. You were in there. And Majic. He didn't want me awake." Gradually, his voice had become thick, intolerably dismal. "Don't think this is easy or something. I…I've been awake…the last few hours, laying up there, trying to... You know, thinking about it. I guess it still hasn't really sunk in. I was thinking about what to do. What I should do, you know. If it's too late for me...I might as well be of some kind of use before I'm too sick to do it."

"You don't know any of that. Maybe you should let _that_ sink in before you make any more crazy decisions." she said again, pressing her palms against her eyes. "What you're saying is straight up crazy. And, what, you're going to go now? Right now? You go in there…if things are what you say they are, what makes you think you could do _anything_, even with the way you are now? What are you going to do?"

He regarded her, straight-faced and bleak. "I'm going to close it."

Stephanie squinted hard at him, as though reading his intentions in the air between them, her face slowly creasing in anger. "Close it," she repeated heatedly. "Implode it, you mean. _Bury yourself_, is what you mean." Her voice rose up again, threatening to become a shout as it hissed out between her teeth. "Orphen…you have to know I can't let you do that. Sacrifice yourself for, _what_, a huge maybe? Just so you can feel better about going down swinging?"

"Sacrifice?" The corner of his mouth quirking up inexplicably. "It's better than just laying there, waiting for the moment I turn and one of you has to put me down like a dog. I doubt anybody wants to do that any more than I want to wait for it. Which of you are going to do it? Did you already draw straws?"

"I want to ask the doctor."

"What?" He let out a tiny ghost of a laugh. "Get his opinion on if I'm a goner or not? If he tells you I'm walking meat you'll give me your blessing?"

There was a long silence, she fastened her eyes on his pointedly. "You know what this will do to her. She's lost so much, she's already about to break. If she loses you…"

He didn't need to ask who. "So it's better for her to watch me die? Telling herself the whole time it's her fault? Yeah. That sounds more humane. How selfish of me."

"_Orphen_."

"If you're going to bother with the doctor, you should do it for Tim. Tim could have a chance, Steph. He didn't walk around stupid for two days thinking he was just fucking tired. It's nobody's fault. It just..." He paused, didn't continue. "I'm going. Before anybody wakes up, I'm going."

Stephanie hugged herself, her shoulders hunching around her like she was bearing weight. "Cleo won't forgive you if you tricked her into undoing your restraints."

"Maybe not," he said softly. "But somebody was going to have to let me up eventually to use the bathroom. It's not her fault that she untied me when I asked. I didn't trick her."

"She might think so. After all, the doctor takes Grays with his hands bound."

"The kid? I wouldn't doubt it. And any idea how long he's been like this?"

"No," she said, her voice thin and hesitant, "Can't be much longer than you. But he's infected the same way: blood to blood. It spreads through open wounds. Blood to blood, saliva to blood. Infectious pathogens to the bloodstream. It's the same mechanism. Open wounds," she repeated weakly, her suffering sentence structure getting more harried and strange the longer she tried to explain. "Everyone—all of the crew who opened the rectory wall is dead. My last contact with the university hospital said it was being shut down on quarantine. Their hands turned black. Rotted off." The corners of her mouth tugged downward, her chin dimpling while she held back that tidal wave. "I don't remember them having any wounds. Not on their hands. Not anywhere. But it's like everywhere they touched…"

In the study, the amber light from the fire and high burning lamp didn't reach the corners. It lit the walls lined with cracked leather book spines and dusty parchment rolls, the rosewood shelves and molding all as bright as the red drapes in the bright firelight, but his reflection in the great gilded mirror over the mantelpiece looked more than half-dead as it was, surrounded by the lavish interior of what felt unshakably like a funeral parlor. "It's only a matter of time for everyone at this rate."

She turned wet eyes to him. "You're only telling me any of this because you wanted me to tell you you're right. Or that you might have any _chance_ of being right." With a cold shudder, she continued in a strained whisper. "You're not going to tell her. Are you." Somehow, it didn't sound like a question, the way she said it. Only like an accusation.

Orphen flicked his feverish eyes at her on defensive reflex, his mouth in a hard line. "It would only make things worse."

"For who? _You_? What about everybody else?" Tears finally dropped down Stephanie's face and she wiped at them with a cutting laugh, shaking her head at the floor before throwing her arms around him in what felt unmistakably like farewell. She was giving her own kind of reluctant permission to let him go, no matter what she said about it. "Orphen, you're so stupid."

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

He stood over her while she slept. Five minutes, ten. He wasn't sure. Things didn't seem as clear as they once had. If that was stress, or the slow decay of his brain, he didn't bother to analyze much. He'd been forced to think about it all, laying there in bed with her the last several hours—resting the way she told him he had to. As though rest was all he needed to heal. _Rest_. Chicken soup, maybe. Orange juice. Tea. Whatever it was mothers brought their sick children, though he was reasonably sure Cleo's mother had never brought her anything. They had an entire staff devoted to that purpose. He didn't remember being sick much as a child. Just the once he'd had scarlet fever, and the Tower infirmary nurse had begrudgingly brought him food and a liquid medicine that had tasted like leaves for about two weeks.

Why he'd come back upstairs after putting so much effort into creeping out of the bed, silently dressing himself, he likewise hadn't put more thought into other than Stephanie had admonished him rather severely for intending to leave her asleep. It seemed the most logical choice to him. Her pain would be more brief if she didn't have to watch him go. But all the same, he could have still just walked out the door the way he'd wanted, if it was really what he'd _wanted_.

On reflex, he reached behind his neck to unclasp his pendant from the Tower, the silver chain twinkling against itself when it released into his hand.

He bent, coiling the chain under the heavy charm and setting it soundlessly in her open, upturned palm. She lay sleeping on her side, still in her sweater and denim, lips parted to breathe out the night air.

His heart was pumping diseased blood, his flesh slowly turning against him and he should have been vengeful and furious and he wasn't.

There was only fear. A grief he hadn't known for years. Profound regret. This was why he'd wanted to leave quickly.

From the first day he'd known her, he was doomed. Doomed to love this officious, arrogant girl. It had taken time to realize it. He'd struggled against it, fought for a sense of power over her-over his own life- because she left him feeling so goddamn helpless. It had taken even longer, too long, to really admit it. He never had, not out loud. Never would. The best he'd ever done was in the last couple days. Perhaps something in him had known that he'd run out of time.

If life was fair, if things were different, perhaps. There was no more perhaps. She'd have to go on without him. It was his job to do his best to make sure there was something for her to go on _with_.

Why that thought knocked him off balance like a tidal wave, he didn't have the clarity to understand. Just suddenly he was drowning, sucking for air against panic and despair, dropped to the floor beside the bed, not fighting tears so much as being consumed by the crippling dread that came along with them.

And then, her voice, small and fragile like it never was. Like the sound of a bird. Of bells. Of wind in leaves, summer cricketsong, ocean tides and everything good that he would never hear again. It made him tremble.

"What are you doing up?"

He shook his head, facing away from her with his back against the bedframe, trying to refocus on the ruby ghost of the dwindling fire while he worked up a reply.

"You're dressed?" She shifted in the bed, then grew still. He heard the metal song of the pendant chain unraveling in her hand before her legs swung over the bedside and she sank down beside him, her fist clenched tight around the swinging necklace while she climbed into his arms, twining their limbs, her face cool against his burning neck when she spoke. "Orphen, _no_."

He just held onto her, wrapped her in his arms. It felt so good. He closed his eyes, dropped his forehead onto her shoulder, breathed the sweet musk of her skin. The dread retreated back an inch.

"Whatever you're planning to do, don't," she whispered, her breath against his throat. "Orphen. _Please_."

He wanted to tell her he was dying. That he wouldn't get better. That if he was going to be able to do anything, he had to do it while he still had the strength; while he was still lucid. Instead all he could get out was: "Don't cry."

She must have known it, known everything with the way she was shaking, bottling up her volcanic blast of emotions. He touched her face, and she pushed forward, her lips on his. She drew back just enough to whisper his name into his own mouth, pleading with him, punctuating it with kiss after kiss, crawling her fingers into his dark hair, the light drag of her nails on his scalp.

Maybe he wasn't completely lucid. He didn't recall exactly when he'd tipped her over, when she'd parted her legs and wrapped him with them. Kissing her was satiating something deep and desperate, a visceral thirst for intimacy, maybe comfort. Drawing his mouth down the exposed line of her throat, her collar bone, tasting her skin and the rumble of her vocal cords under his lips, it was satisfying in a way almost nothing had ever been before. More than water after hours of parched thirst. More than food after a days-long hunger strike when he'd lived penniless in the streets. More than the culmination of a long-sought revenge. Before he'd even drawn the next logical step in his mind, he was already inside her, the long-imagined memory of how it began all but lost and everything moving with an almost clumsy urgency that felt aggravatingly slow to his sluggish logic. His thoughts had ceased to be words, just sound and rhythm, recording only sensation. She rocked under him, her lips closing on his earlobe, mewling things he couldn't seem to translate to human language through the crash of need and fear and possessive animal lust clamoring in him. In a flash of bestial ardor, he wanted more, even after he'd crested over the precipice and she was quaking under him, her breaths grown deep and slow, her moans quiet and almost guttural.

He wanted more. He wanted to consume her entirely, her flesh and thoughts, make her part of him. He wanted to sink his teeth in and taste the blood in her life giving heart, and he was inundated with cold, sharp terror at the thought.

"I love you," she whispered through what he could scarcely identify as tears. He was making her cry. "I love you, _I love you."_

She seemed to stop herself, her mouth trembling around an unspoken mouthful that likely harbored more of the same, forgetting her obstinate pride in favor of what rushed out with the intensity of a holy confession.

_Father, forgive me for I have sinned._ If it was ever a sin to love; it always had felt like one to him.

Orphen swallowed hard, still panting, whatever he'd been thinking about washed away by the sadness in her tearful, heartsick whisper. In each their own way, after the long war of attrition between them, they'd managed to destroy the other entirely. He pulled her into bed with him, covering her, kissing her. They made love twice more before exhaustion overcame their zeal, leaving them in a sweat slicked naked sleep that he woke from shortly before the pale clouded sunrise, the fire gone cold and dead in the corner hearth. Her arms were around him, her skin still damp against his, and he would have felt peace if not for the thrumming in his head like tribal war drums. He had heard it in his sleep like a violent intuition, felt it like a pulse, something he could feel breathing in the dark around him, raising the hair on his arms with its sibilant murmuring while it waited to bear down. It pulled him from the heavy stupor of sleep, from the bed and he dressed silently, almost holding his breath while he struggled painfully into his jacket, wiping at his eyes, lacing his boots with inarticulate, shaking hands. Delirium tremens. The fever was gaining ground and weight, filling his skull like a liquid. Clearly, he had less time than he had been thinking. Maybe a lot less.

He plucked the pendant up from the floor and left it on the bedside table, with only a last, lingering glance at her in the dark: her hair scattered around her face and naked shoulders, one hand curled near her throat with the blue jewel of her necklace catching the scant light, winking up at him from where it was settled against her throat. He bent to kiss her a last time but thought better of it; he couldn't risk waking her again. Floating in the air above her, he repeated the words she'd told him through tears hours before, his mouth feeling numb and surreal around them. They were words he had never intended would ever leave his mouth, though it was safe now. _N__ow _was the only moment he had left.

With what felt like a dagger in his chest, he whispered that other set of words that had never sounded more wrong to his ears when he was likely headed into the yawning mouth of hell: "I dance in thee, mansion of heaven."

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

_To be continued…_


	17. The Imprisoned

**XVII: The Imprisoned**

As sudden as breaking a sweat, it had happened. On waking, that was how she remembered it. Sudden, hurried. Clutching hands, open mouths and breath, a rushed struggle out of clothing, the roll of her spine against the hard floor under the throw rug. The cling and drag of flesh on flesh.

Afterward, they'd lay silent less in serenity than in shellshock. They hadn't spoken. She'd listened to his strange breathing, never catching sight of his face. In the dark warmth of his arms, in bed after he was wrung out breathless beside her, she'd fought sleep like a warrior, memorizing him. The smell of leather and sweetgrass smoke. The brine taste of sweat, the flower-petal taste of the medication still a ghost on his lips. She memorized the rough pads of his fingers running along her scalp, hands sweeping through her hair and cradling her skull when he kissed her over and over, slower and deeper the thinner the hours grew.

And everything about it tasted like goodbye. She knew that.

When she woke in the stark, lightless morning, as she'd dreaded, he was gone. Gone in a way she had felt before, like the way she'd felt waking the morning after her father had died. The silent, hollow, almost imperceptible change in the air like the first day of winter; the foggy, ineffable certainty that something was lost.

How _could _he?

What was left of him: the Tower pendant on the bedside table. Pinprick spots of blood on a pillowcase. A vague ache low in her abdomen, and a sharper one in her chest. With her face wet, still nude in the rustling sheets, she reached for the pendant and looped the cold chain around her neck, over her head, settling the icy metal against her breastplate, tenting it protectively under her hand.

For whatever reason, she thought of seeing it for the first time, gleaming in the noon sunlight against his faded shirt, hiding under the metal studded rawhide of his jacket. He'd looked at her with little interest, his eyes too glitter-black and intense to do anything but mesmerize the most reasonless, romance-novel, rhinestone-jewelry, little-girl part of her that coveted the unfamiliar. At the time, he'd barely spared her a glance except to duck out of the way of her swinging a blade at him. At the time, he'd had eyes for the sword and the sword only.

When that had changed, if it had ever really changed, she hadn't noticed. After all, she'd been too obsessed with her own tragedies to notice that he was dying in front of her.

Maybe she should have resisted. After all, she'd just fallen onto her back for him with barely a thought. Her atrophied sense of propriety had gone paralytic in a mad grab to feel something, maybe anything; maybe just _nothing_. Anything that wasn't the same prison of grief and guilt. Something big enough or empty enough to overshadow it all, even for a minute. Something that would make her feel like she was at least still alive. And it had made her feel gloriously, unashamedly alive. Maybe even happy, in an unthinking sort of way. It was an appropriate kind of goodbye: everything hidden, unspoken and clouded by urgency.

When the door opened after however long she'd lay there in the sheets, near catatonic, she didn't look up, just keeping her head buried, arms around the pillow while whoever it was stood at the door, looking in wordlessly. Succumbing to more silent tears, she slowly breathed through the cage of her fingers and closed her eyes, pressing out tears, screaming without making a sound, praying wordlessly to her traitor God that despite logic, he would come back.

That darkness she'd always sensed in Orphen, the one that she'd wanted a piece of, now it was hers, inherited down from him just like the pendant: a deep anger like a smoldering coal.

...ooo...ooo...ooo...ooo...

The wound was pulsating. He could feel it stretching, slow and burning, like a line of ants eating down his arm. It didn't help that he'd undershot the distance on the translocation and ended up somewhere in the shin-deep snow of the high desert between Alenhaten and Bazilkok, exhaustion hitting him like a thunderclap and no option other than to walk the rest of the way. What he hadn't expected to see were the bodies. All the bodies, seemingly crawled out into the snowfield to die, the delirium having stolen their sense the way it was slowly robbing him of his own. After all, here he was, out in the snow. With them, unarmed, half-dead himself, maybe following whatever they had been following; chasing a shadow.

It was a mindbending landscape, these scores of corpses buried face first in the ice, blue and crumpled in torn shreds of clothing or nothing at all. The land was dotted with them, some in piles, others fallen outstretched, reaching with numb hands toward nothing. Some were mangled, wounds open to the cold wet air, others bandaged. None of them alive.

The dig site was hulking on the horizon, the sunken hovel of broken limestone and the wooden framed chasm they'd excavated around it. The piece of it that had extended above ground was nothing extraordinary. Indeed, that anyone had even thought to dig up this wind-blasted pile of rock could have been nothing short of a gamble on it being anything at all. He recalled Stephanie puzzling over the location, complaining that no Nornir texts had ever even alluded to what, according to dimensions, had to be a structure massive enough to warrant mention. Only the temple twelve furlongs to the south on the edge of the city had ever been mapped, and even that was found by following Nornir writings. Stephanie's eventual hypothesis was that they were the same structure, stretching under the desert like a catacomb. Certainly, it wasn't a real possibility.

Laboring against the cold wind, his cough had worsened. It would stop his walking, bend him in half with a pain like shards of glass buried in his lungs. He would cough until his palm was wet with blood and wipe it in the snow, the fever heat rolling off him, melting the ice and hitting him with a ripple of vertigo on the way back to standing.

He hadn't expected to deteriorate so rapidly. Probably that was stupid. He'd thought there was still time, but the end of his life was running up to meet him. He'd find it somewhere in that forbidding stone structure, ironically where he'd spent the last few months. Reading old forgotten runes in poor light, hunched over rubbings made of stonework at late at night, cold and hungry and miserable. Alone as ever.

This was his life. Years ago, he'd thrown away whatever success might have become of it. That it was over now didn't seem so terrible.

People had punctuated his hours for most of his years, supporting players. But there were no constants. He was always moving. Making sure never to grow roots anywhere, so he'd never have to tear them up and feel that kind of pain again. That he felt any sort of hurt at a separation from anyone, it was a red flag. That was what he'd been thinking when he'd left to work with Stephanie. Just to shake some of that familiarity off.

Because he'd been growing roots. Moss, more like. Majic had become restless. Cleo had become mercurial, agreeable one minute, sullen and withdrawn the next. They'd been fighting with more intensity than felt typical, he'd felt smothered by it all. Trapped. By Majic's increasing needs, the questions he didn't have the patience to answer, the theory he didn't feel textbook-certain enough to teach. And by Cleo just being around.

The worst part of all the walking was that it had given him far too much unwanted time to think. To feel sorry for himself and increasingly guilty.

Everything was over. Anything that could happen had already happened, and it was only a matter of time before he was gone. Exhaustion wasn't an excuse. His clock was ticking. The last grains of sand draining. He could feel it. If he had an option between dropping dead or going down in a fight, he would always choose the latter. He didn't understand anyone who wouldn't. That was what he should have been keeping in mind, but he'd never pretended to be any kind of fucking hero any more than he'd pretended to be a mentor, a good teacher or even a decent human being.

He wasn't any of those things.

He didn't want to think about it.

With his cloak cocooned tight around him, clutching the hood closed, he squinted against an increasing snowblind. Thicker on the ground around him, approaching the abandoned dig site entry, the bodies. Their faces were frozen in blue-mouthed gapes, everything that had once been pink and alive a mottled mosaic of white and gray, lips peeled back to show blood blackened teeth and blue gums. They were tracked with the crawling black necrosis of a rotting circulatory system, their fingers dark with frostbite or missing altogether.

But inside the stone structure was nothing but a bone cracking weight of silence, a chill of death.

Into the dark, he called forth a weak sun spire, making a torch with unstable hands before proceeding into the complex, his boots scratching on the basalt block floor, his breath ghosting white in the air, the fire raising shadows in high relief against the walls painted garish with their runic warnings until he arrived at the rectory entry, a stone panel as heavy as the entire world. Above in the ornate fresco, a scene of fire and the cosmos, the unsettling rune phrase whose translation Stephanie had sent by telegraph.

_None among the living shall disturb the long sleep of the noble departed, they shall breathe time and swallow the night._

And on the slab door, the rune phrase they'd puzzled over for months. _Vreecti-dvelt-noctum. _

_Ure. Dnat. Urab. _

Not an honorific, more of a headstone. Not a prayer canticle, more like an epitaph.

Baltander.

They'd barely opened it a crack before the excavation's heavy lifting team was infected. According to Stephanie's medical report, they were retching onto the floor in minutes, they were gagging on swelling tongues, oozing blood while they carried them out on slipshod stretchers. The onslaught of something that was originally thought of as a biological agent, engineered by the Nornir to keep intruders out.

In Stephanie's medical report, the first case of Rhinehold was diagnosed the day following the first day of excavation at the Bazilkok site. Patient Zero, he'd come to find out, was one of the archelogist's assistants, one charged with cataloging mineral samples brought back from the site for chemical dating. The assistant was working with recently dressed surgical wounds. They'd diagnosed it as spore exposure. She'd died within days.

Maybe everything was the opposite of what it had originally seemed. All of this pit of hell masquerading as something safe and scientific, purely academic. But even the Nornir hadn't the medical technology to engineer sickness, they'd never even managed goddamn railway much less biological weapons. They'd had no need; their genetic predisposition for high sorcery negated any such technology. Everything he'd ever been taught, every class he'd fought sleep through had stressed that the only branch of sorcery that could inflict disease, necromancy, was absolutely prohibited in any form; cases involving such accusations were strictly regulated by the Thirteen Angels council at the court in Meverlenst. The punishment for a conviction was death.

There had been no recorded convictions for hundreds of years, and those were condemned as rampant paranoia. It was something out of books. Stories. Maybe he was crazy for believing it. Crazy for throwing himself into it as a last resort, desperate to go down chasing something like he was always meant to.

The rectory door wasn't going anywhere with physical effort, not that he truly had any to give to the cause. And there was the barrier somewhere beyond the wall, the strong crackle of magick he'd felt for months, making the tiny hairs on the back of his neck ruffle up from the arcane charge every time he was too close to it.

Hands against the wall, he exhaled, woozy. He'd never move the slab on his own, even at full strength. What he'd have to do to get past, it was a the first thing he'd ever been expressly taught never to do: translocate to an area he'd never physically visited. The danger was obvious. The traveller had no concept of the terrain, the elevation. It was the same as crossing a stream of unknown depth in the pitch dark, with the added danger of hitting the barrier.

Projecting the direction just a few yards forward into the unknown space beyond the stone slab, he focused his intent. He said the words that sent him, and once inside the effects were felt, his entry coming halfway down a steep stone staircase, dropping him painfully down to the first landing, snuffing his torch entirely with the movement and dangerously thin air.

Agony lanced from his shoulder down his spine, bone-deep and breath stealing. His skull throbbed in response and he lay prone in the dark, fighting for air in the death smelling black, climbing up on his knees, his heart straining. A strangling fear was clawing up from inside him, draining the strength from his muscles, leaving him half crumpled on the staircase, frozen. Something about the air. The feeling of the place, pushing down on his from all sides. Like it was breathing. Like it was crawling on him, the phantom feeling of insects he wanted to swipe off.

Out in the dark, the silence was massive and deep. With a trembling hand, he felt at the ground, finding a shard of broken rock that he dropped down the stairs. The rattle of stone descended far, but there was no echo. Nothing but the sound of it clattering, falling, until it was too far to hear.

He was holding his breath without meaning to. With a slow, shaking exhale, he pushed his legs out in front of him to climb to his feet while holding the wall, the injured left knee creaking under his weight, a hot welling of blood running down his shin, under his clothes.

He backed up. Climbed blindly up the stairs, back toward the rectory door he'd bypassed, only a few yards behind him. Or what should have only been a few yards. The further he climbed back with searching hands, the more the sinister truth became clear, even without light. The door-the point of entry-it was gone, and he was already far past the barrier.

Under his breath, frost fogging up around his face when he spoke, he incanted so lowly he could scarcely hear it over the rush of his own heartbeat. "I create thee, small spirit."

When the sorcery drew from him, a hot wave of dizzy nausea followed. In his hand, he grasped the spirit light, fighting to keep it solid. It reached out into the dark, a long depth of spirial stairs with a wide diameter, descending into a sprawl of black that the luminance could not puncture. Craning his neck back, he gazed upward, up the staircase spiraling overhead toward the surface, so far the light could not touch it.

How he had gotten so far down or why the barrier had let him through it...he couldn't begin to fathom. But with no point of entry or reference, translocation was not possible. To think, in getting here, he could have missed the ground and gone plummeting down the center of the staircase, likely dying of his disease or hypothermia long before he hit bottom.

With his fist around the light, he bent and coughed, the pain sparking somewhere near his heart, gripping his lungs. With every tense jerk, he tasted blood, and spat it on the steps.

And in response to his voice, from below, it rushed up the staircase. Like a roar of wind that cannot be felt, that moves no air. Soundless but deafening, a scream, a whisper inside his head, deep as the growl of the shaking continent, piercing, assaulting him as though he'd never heard a sound in his life. He'd heard it in his sleep, sibilant and percussive as a wardrum, shaking him awake. And he'd heard it before that. Maybe he'd been hearing it for years. Since that day Azalie had dragged him along to the island where they should never have even anchored the boat.

And it knew he was here.

Far below, what felt like thousands of miles down that staircase, something was turning toward him. In the black vaults of his mind, it breathed. It flicked a spectral tongue, and Orphen's knees buckled again, dropping him, a boil of cold bile burning in his throat.

He lost concentration, and the small spirit light, it went out.

He'd come to collapse this place. To seal it up, even if he had to do it while still inside. Stephanie had called it a sacrifice. To him, the term sacrifice implied a choice.

And since the truth had come to him, had flooded in, he had been helpless against it. There was no choice. There was just the call. Maybe it was the call they had all heard. This plague that had put the continent under martial law, the populace cowering behind their locked doors, preferring to wait, to fade, to starve or freeze instead of fight. As though there was something to fight.

Despite the choking sense of primitive fear, there was irresistible need. He _needed _to know what was down there. Whatever all those infected dead clustered in the snowfield far above, dropped dead long before the entrance, had followed. The one impulse still governing their deteriorating minds, one of survival. Or servitude.

Perhaps that impulse had tricked him into believing what he wanted. Perhaps it was perverting his perception of everything, his mind spiraling into its own biological chaos.

He had only made it a few twists down, feeling along the dark wall with numb hands, an icy sweat frosting his back when he heard it, every inch of him reduced to raw nerve endings. Far below, the tiny scratch of footsteps, feet on gritty stone.

And they were coming up the stairs.

...ooo...ooo...ooo...ooo...

Stephanie's soft, stocking-footed feet bumped up the wooden steps behind where Hartia stood in the open bedroom doorway, staring in with red rimmed eyes and his hands hanging useless at his sides, a rusty shadow of a beard darkened his chin.

"He's gone," Cleo told him again, her hands clawed on the sides of the door frame, watching Hartia's eyes follow the chain around her neck to the large charm, a winged serpent around a dagger. He wore the same one. He understood its value; and why Orphen's leaving it behind made a louder statement than he might have made himself.

"Where?" he fumbled with the words, his tongue slow with surprise, blinking back tears, half-turning to see Stephanie on the catwalk landing with her mouth set into a grim line. "Where could he go like that? Christ, where is there to _go_?"

Thoughtfully, Stephanie wet her lips but said nothing. Cleo watched her eyes drift toward the pendant much the same as Hartia's had, and her mouth bent in a queer hybrid of smiling and tensing under the weight of a breakdown.

"Tell me!" Hartia barked, the sound a verbal gunshot in the morning silence that made Cleo start, her heart jumping. "Why wouldn't you tell me? Did he _ask _you not to tell me?"

"Hartia, calm down. You sound-"

"I sound what? What do I have to be calm about?" He directed his mounting furor at Stephanie. "Where did he go?"

"To Bazilkok," she told him, eyes wet behind her glasses. "Would you have stopped him?"

Hartia's face crumpled briefly, he brought a hand over his eyes to obscure it while he fought the clear impulse to cry, choking out before whipping his hand back down. "I would have talked him out of it! Why! What's _wrong _with you!"

"Doesn't a man deserve to choose how he dies?" She spat at him, her voice laden heavy with unshed tears. "If he thinks he can do some kind of good before he can't anymore? You don't get to _choose _for him, _Hartia_. Maybe that's not what you would do. Maybe that's not the kind of person you are. But that's the kind of person Orphen was."

Hartia seethed wordlessly, grinding the back of his wrist into an eye, flinching back from them both to gather himself.

Cleo swallowed thickly, drew a shuddering breath. _That's the kind of person Orphen was._

_Was._

She could still feel the pinch in her body where he'd been. His sweat was still on her skin. Slowly, she curled her hands into fists, squeezed her nails into her palm.

"No one is going after him? Are you people serious? You-you're just going to let him go out there to die? For what? For fucking what!" She'd never seen Hartia so angry. His eyes were stretched wide, the whites showing all around his dusky blue irises, a vein standing out on his forehead. She reached for him only to have him swing a hand at her, shooing her back, swatting at her like a fly.

Maybe this would have been her own reaction under other circumstances. Blind emotional fury. Maybe she should have felt the same way. The last Hartia had seen of him, from what she'd heard, he'd ambushed him with a syringe and dropped him to the ground. Once they had been like brothers, though that bond had been twisted to its breaking point after Azalie's accident. It had never fully recovered, despite Hartia's good natured attempts. Orphen had never exactly said as much, but she wasn't blind. He didn't trust him, but then, she wasn't sure Orphen trusted anybody. But she was certain, he still wouldn't want Hartia going out after him.

"You want to go after him?" A voice from the stair landing. Ambrose Farrior, buttoning down his waistcoat, his perpetually hooded eyes casting his gaze in a slow, measured arc. He spared Cleo a momentary extra glance while he breezed past Stephanie, centering in on Hartia mired in his tangible, reasonless rage. "What do you hope to do?"

Hartia shook his head furiously, his lips pressed thin, gaze downcast.

"I was told we had no chance of reaching the University hospital without his help."

He turned toward the aristocrat with his face arranged like he'd eaten something sour, goaded to response by the unspoken implication that even half-dead, Orphen was the preferable and more able guide. "The University isn't likely to let anyone in, no matter who you have helping you," he spat.

"He should be brought back, he couldn't be far. Despite his dire condition my father had high hopes for his treatment…" The doctor's son spoke breezily, seemingly undaunted, as though he had any idea how far he could have gotten in the time he'd been gone. But the word _treatment_ hung in Cleo's mind. Standing in this same place on the catwalk, overlooking the great room, she'd said the same word to Orphen.

"_Treatment?"_ he'd responded_. "Sounds like it just makes everything worse."_

Hartia gave Ambrose a superior kind of smirk. "There is no way to know how far he might be. Furlongs by now. You willing to risk it?"

"My life for a chance to help my brother?" With his eyes still almost looking bored, his lip practically curled at the alternative. "Or my life for someone already sentencing themselves to death?"

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"Hardly."

"Fine," he told him, folding his arms tight. "You risk it and I'll escort all of you to the University myself on our return."

"_Hartia_," Cleo warned shakily, only for that hand to swat at her again, wave her voice away like a puff of smoke. She glowered at him; he ignored her.

"I thought they weren't likely to let anyone in. Assuming we did return."

"We'll return. Then I'll get you and Grays and your Dad to the University hospital by any means necessary."

"Hartia!"

"Why would you need me? You apparently require no assistance in your own safety."

"If I have to carry him back, I'll be defenseless. Going alone is suicide."

"Going at _all _is suicide. _Both _of you," Stephanie interrupted, stepping between them. "You think it's noble, what you think you're planning? You really think we need more of this? Are you being _manly_?" The way she said it, in a way that only Stephanie could have said it, had its own kind of bitter sarcasm. "Is this what _men _do?"

Ambrose turned his narrow-eyed cat's stare on her. "It is a man's duty and honor to protect his family and those in his charge, even if it costs him his own life. It isn't a _woman's _place to judge what is necessary-"

Quick as a scream, Cleo stepped forward, abandoning all that would-be refined femininity that she had always been told became a woman. All those etiquette lessons. How to sit, how to walk, how to cover her mouth if she laughed, which fork to use, the importance of always looking effortlessly graceful as a lady should. She balled up a fist and swung it hard into Ambrose Farrior's face. He reeled back, turning his head away with his features tensed into an arrangement of wounded fury, bringing a hand up to catch at the tumble of noseblood coming off the crest of his upper lip and striping down the tailored white cuff of his shirt, red as an uncoiling spool of holiday ribbon. She turned her sneer on Hartia. "I'd expect better from _you_."

With her knuckles throbbing in syncopation with every thundering heartbeat and unsure what she'd even meant by the comment, she extended an arm around Stephanie's waist, and turned her to head back downstairs. She threw a glare over her shoulder that she'd learned from Orphen; a facsimile of his words coming from her mouth in his absence. "Don't wave your goddamned hand at me."

And in his absence, someone else would have to bear the weight of the rage building in her like a storm cloud, her brokenhearted ire at his choice to leave, even if it was just his version of protecting those in his charge-the supposed duty of a man. She wanted to punch him for even thinking about leaving, for avoiding the treatment, for thinking he might accomplish _anything _by going out there and dying alone.

She wanted to maim him for it, and he'd taken away her chance to do even that.

Orphen and his selfish, foolish, knee-jerk heroism. She loved him more than she could stand. Now she was stuck with that profound ache with nothing to assuage it for the rest of her life.

...ooo...ooo...ooo...ooo...

_To be continued..._


	18. Stone and Shadow

**XVIII: Stone and Shadow**

The things he'd heard, he hadn't heard them with his ears. They'd echoed around the cave of his skull instead-the pounding voice of degenerative disease. But this, this tiny sound of movement far down that wide, crumbling staircase, brought a new kind of fear with it. Because it was real, alive; something moving down there in the bottomless dark.

Nobody could have gotten past that slab, past the barrier. He wasn't even certain how he had done it beyond gambling with his quickly dwindling life and doing exactly what no sorcerer should ever have done. His leg was still throbbing from the initial fall, the wet blood going cold the longer it was exposed to the frigid air. He kept his weight off it, palms and back flat against the curving wall, frozen still; listening, willing the whir of his brain to silence.

It scratched up the steps. Closer. Maybe faster. Or maybe he was imagining it all. He didn't know anymore.

And when he closed his eyes, quieted everything, straining against the silence to listen, all he could hear was the ringing of high blood pressure, his own breath. Then the scratch, the gritty scrape of stone under foot falls.

Bringing up a hand, he spoke under his breath, drawing his legs up under himself in preparation, ignoring the pain that resulted. "I call thee, spectral blade."

The arc of energy drew out from his hand, dull, flickering. It wavered in his hand, weaker than what Majic could create. It cast a light electric blue as the base of a flame, lighting the steps in front of him, the stairs extending into a downward spiraling funnel of stone and shadow.

And into that frail light, it emerged. An enormous, corpulent tomb rat.

Orphen let out a lungful of breath, wilting against the wall with a feeble curse.

He swiped the blade in its direction, the ghostly edges sparking in contact with the stone, sending the greasy rodent scratching past him, running further up the spiraling steps. It reminded him, with a sick-stomached kind of memory. It was in some history class, he didn't remember where, about the mage clan wars and ships sinking while the crew drowned below decks, before they knew their vessel was doomed. The survivors reported ship rats running up the stairs, away from the rising water. They'd survived by following the rats' predisposition to run from danger.

And here he was, inching further down against that same warning of instinct, moved to cold sweat by a scratching in the dark. He'd been called reckless before in his life, and stubborn and stupid and every other damn thing Cleo had ever thought to call him-

No. None of that now.

He exhaled hard, pushed out all the breath in his body before sucking in a lungful of the ever thinning air and setting off a deep, rattling cough that left him breathless and tasting blood . By the light of his sputtering spectral sword, he slipped down a few more twists in the wide staircase, moving quicker than before. Not inching down like a goddamn coward.

When he stepped down to the next landing, inexplicably, despite how long and far that tossed stone that rattled down the staircase, the sound shrinking into silence before it hit bottom, he'd reached the landing. He couldn't have been certain of how long he'd been on the staircase. The more he tried to remember, the less he could even recall entering the building. The walk in the snow was difficult to remember now, whatever he'd seen there, how long he'd walked.

When he'd even left the house...

The pale blue luminance of the sword dipped while he fought to focus his remaining energy; holding it aloft as he edged forward in the black expanse that extended below the staircase, the light never reaching the ceiling. He walked. Walked for what maybe was hours, but sometimes felt like minutes and other times felt like months. Occasionally, he would come to a thick stone pillar, its surface strange and polished, dark but reflective, extending too high to see where it ended in the vaults above. There was no point of reference, only an innate sense of a vast empty space all around him and no indication from which direction he had come, no echos. No sound but his own breath and the scrape of his boots gritty floor.

And maybe it was sudden.

Or maybe it wasn't, a more gradual realization, he didn't know. Didn't remember. He was having trouble remembering. But standing still in that deep place, lost in distance, swallowed by the stone stomach of the continent, he was more certain of it than he may have been of anything else in his entire life.

That someone was standing behind him.

Someone, distinctly someone, standing. Just standing, silent, unmoving. There was no sound of breath, not a sound of life. Only the absolute certainty that someone, tall, maybe towering, was standing less than arm's length away, just behind his back. Someone frighteningly familiar, waiting for him to turn. That was before the sensation that it was in front of him too, to the side. Above him, staring down. All around, watching. Watching. And he couldn't breathe through the suffocation of it. He stood frozen, unsure now how he'd even been standing before he pivoted and swung around with his teeth clenched tight, hurling the blade in a blazing blue arc that met with nothing but cold air.

He'd thrown his weight into the swing, certain he would strike the unmistakable mass of whatever thing had crept up behind him. Hitting nothing, he stumbled forward with the wasted momentum, his boots scraping stone and then splashing, the sudden movement rising a painful wave of nausea that dropped him to his knees in the shallow, sulfur stinking pool that rose a gag from him but little else.

His breath couldn't resist freezing midair and here he was, knelt in something cold and _wet_, the weird stink wicking up in his clothes.

With trouble, he tightened his focus on the remains of the spectral blade, its frail light reflected in the shivering surface, and craned his aching neck down, puffing clouds of breath. He brought the arc of energy closer to his face, enough that, leering pale from the dark sheet of glassy fluid below, he could see himself, his reflection, huffing and sick, trembling in the dark. Looking pathetic, more than half dead.

And that face, with its hollow, black-ringed too-big eyes staring out from a fringe of sweat-damp hair, its lips drew back and smiled.

It smiled. But he hadn't.

It was the only warning he had, if anybody could call it that. What it was, he couldn't see, his peripheral vision saturated with nothing but the impenetrable black. There was the sound of moving air, an invisible train screaming by, an enormous exhale that fluttered his hair like hurricane wind.

He lost focus so suddenly it was like being clubbed in the skull. The blade flickered and snuffed out like a dropped candle, and there was the feeling of something cold climbing hand over hand through his soul. It sunk its fingers into his mind like roots crawling into mud, and he lurched against the feeling and the sound, the sound of something snarling, a guttural bark interspersed with high wailing that would have made him snap his palms over his ears on reflex if he could only move. It bubbled and smeared in his head, becoming rhythm like a strange discordant music, like clouds forming shapes.

He'd come here to destroy this place. To bring it down around him, seal it tight as it had been for the centuries before the University team had stumbled upon it. How he thought he'd accomplish this hadn't concerned him, he'd barely even considered it. Like it had ever been, he'd planned to figure it out on the way down. Childman had always scolded him that he didn't plan ahead, he'd warned him it would one day be his end. He'd been so certain; so absolutely sure it was what had to be done, that he was the one that had to do it. He was already infected, dying, with nothing else he could lose now. Almost as though the place were calling to him over the furlongs of ice, begging him to come before it was too late.

None of this was really happening. He was losing his grip on reality, imagining he wasn't down here alone, as though his only enemy now wasn't already running in his veins, taking him apart.

Down on his knees, the formless rushed by and he wheezed at it, fighting to stand with his half-numb leg that shook under him. There was a sound, a wet tearing sound as the wound in his shoulder unseamed itself, the stitches and angry scar tissue splitting, the heat of the rush of blood flowing in a steaming torrent down his arm and into the shallow pool. He would have screamed if he could, but instead, struggled to pump air into his paralyzed lungs. His limbs gave out and he fell into the fluid, too thick for water, its toxic taste on his tongue while he gasped for breath. It was crude, nothing but a mess of crude oil bubbled up through the rents in the stone, the chamber so deep that the subterranean floor was slippery with it. He choked, rolling onto his back with the little motor control he still possessed. He fought to call out; his voice didn't respond.

He gagged, fought to breathe against the grip of pain, the vertigo, the encroaching cold. He was going to bleed to death. He'd come here for nothing. Nothing except to die alone, away from anyone who would care. Too far and deep for Hartia or Majic or Stephanie to even find him. For anybody to ever find his body. He'd rot here, on this oily floor, until he was nothing but bone.

With his eyes burning, he choked aloud. The thing in his mind sunk deeper, tugging on his thoughts, twisting them, perverting them, prying him open like a clam further to fit deeper inside. His thoughts were its weapon, and when he resisted, pushed back against its invasion, it rushed down, the scream of wind bore down on him. The sound of his ribcage cracking, crushing, everything sharp edged inside splitting him, collapsing a lung. The shattering of vertebrae in his back, the pain radiating down each arm like a shock of lightning.

There was pain and nothing else. Not cold, not regret. Not even fear. There was no room in his mind for anything but the soul twisting pain. He could not resist it. The thing, what he'd wanted to be a hallucination conjured up by his diseased mind, it sank in, took a vicious hold that beneath the crush of agony, he could feel it-hear it almost. In the space of a single labored breath, it paged through him like a book. Every memory, every second of his unfortunate twenty three years screaming past his mind, leaving him in breathless, strangled tears.

For the countless hours of that one long moment, reliving his own history of loneliness, carnage and endless failure. On his back, he sucked air, opened his mouth to fight but nothing came-not even a whimper.

It hung on a memory, not intentionally recalled. Just one of a trove of things packed back into a dark corner where he didn't want to look at them. Cleo, standing in the dusk of the cold rose garden in her pale colored cocktail gown, the smell of sweet brandy and the freckles on her shoulders like constellations in the sky, her hair piled ornately on her head, the blink of a blue jewel around her throat.

Then, how she'd begged him not to go. How she'd cried and clutched at him. The curve of her hipbone, the vague stairstep of her ribcage under his fingers, the hollow above her clavicle-where her necklace chain crossed her ivory skin-catching the sound of his breath, the soft drag of her footsole on the back of his flexing thigh at the time of his first shuddering climax. They were all things he'd shoved ruthlessly from his mind, he couldn't think about them. Just couldn't.

How she'd told him she loved him. Between tears and kisses like punctuation. I love you, I love you, _I love you_. And may have even meant it. The thought twisted him, wrung his insides like a wet towel, and he wanted in that moment, desperately, not to die.

He should have minded her request, should have stayed and wasted away there, curled into her warmth and the smell of lavender with her arms around him. Certainly, there were worse ways to die than that. And he should have told her so many things. That he was sorry was only one of them. He'd done none of these things because he was cold, stubborn, hard as granite, an immovable object. Because he was a _coward_. He'd leaned down with her still asleep and, with a tongue made of lead-as though he still had reason to hesitate-told her he loved her even though she'd never hear it. Because he hadn't _wanted _her to hear it. He'd only wanted to say it. As though by saying it he could leave it behind, hanging in the air like an exorcised wraith.

Instead it lingered, stronger and sharper now than it may have ever been; a dagger forever buried in his chest, forcing deeper.

While he'd been looking down on her with his ungainly, cowardly confession, that blue jewel was still winking up from her throat. The blue stone, the jewel of Gigabrious. Hartia had given it to her years before, Orphen had used it to save Azalie from her hideous transformation, and after it had nearly killed him, she'd kept it with her all this time. It had been settled there in the little hollow at the base of her throat every time he'd set eyes on her for the past couple years. He'd never been certain what purpose it served, if any, other than to complete the set of artifacts. After all, she still had the bracelet that Reiki had worn, which amplified power, and the sword belonged...

It thrummed in his mind, a strange explosion of harmonics from a struck tuning fork howling over the landscape of his soul while the pain was fading into a feeling of pervasive cold. He was crushed, bleeding internally, blood still rushing out of his opened wound with every strained, limping beat of his fading heart. And, not having any voice of its own, used his to speak in the pitch of his own thoughts, and with whatever will he had, he pushed back. Resisted.

It could see. See everything; his memories, his thoughts, his fears, every ordinary or petty or terrible thing he had ever done, every thought or daydream he'd ever had-both sentimental and sinful. And for a flicker of a moment he could see it, the way one sees the sky behind them when looking at their reflection in a lake: only viewed on the periphery, as background. This thing, endless and shapeless, imprisoned here in this deep hole in the world where no one should ever have come. This thing, a tiny bit of itself imbued in a sword that had once ruined his life-now it would take what was left of it.

It rumbled with a kind of laughter at that.

All the dead in the snowfields above, they were answering that same call he'd been hearing in his head, less and less subliminal every hour. The hungry revenants wandering the empty streets, searching, too far gone to find their way. He'd known from the start somehow-there was no virus. No infection. There was only this. This thing all around him, in the air, the walls, the space between things. Inside him, in his lungs, his veins, in his brain. It was its own kind of infection, its own plague. Its victims, they were unmade and remade by this unfathomable well of malice, this father of all dead things.

They breathed time. They swallowed the night. They unbecame.

The last thought in his mind before it went dark, was his own, peculiar and random-his mind cracked from all angles like splintered mirror glass-retrieved from having being pulled back to that moment, looking down on her with the jewel around her neck and her hand curled up close to her face: the loathed diamond had been absent from her delicate ring finger.

It did not waste the moment that he was vulnerable, inundating him with itself; its harrowing images of the unspeakable.

They would all fall. One at a time, they would all succumb. Bagup would die, and Tim. Stephanie, Leticia, Azalie. Hartia would fight to the end and fail. Majic would slowly, sadly waste away. Cleo would join her family in death. The more noble thing to do, instead of selfishly abandoning them to their protracted pathetic fates that would leave them begging for death long before it would come, would have been to bring their lives to a swift, more merciful end. It showed him, illustrated for him moment by moment, what it would have looked like for him to be the hero he should have been. What it felt like: that beloved blood hot and wet on his palms; the labored sound of their last breaths.

The impulse to scream rushed up hard and fast. Soundless tears drew wet stripes through the mask of blood and oil, summoned by a sudden swell of world-bending pain rattling down his shattered spine as his thoughts turned to empty space.

ooo...ooo...ooo...ooo

The snow had turned to a gray, slanting rain. She watched it in the late afternoon light, dazed and vacant. The ice outside had marbled up into a slush of filth, flecks of ice still striking the window glass that remained ever fogged by her open-mouthed breath with Majic asleep against her legs in the windowseat, his hair a flattened nest of corn-gold from her vantage point above.

She wasn't thinking about anything anymore. The pinch of her now familiar heartsickness, omnipresent for the last several days, was absent, overshadowed by a humming fury and exhaustion. She wanted to close her eyes and dream of sweet things, of grass and warm buttery sunlight, parties with sparkling champagne and Mariabella dancing, ringing music, fencing competitions with banners and flashing foils, starlight, crickets, the smell of hay in the stable and furniture polish in the upstairs library, holiday cookies, her mother's throaty laughter, all the joy that seemed so irretrievably far from her now. Mundane things she had so often looked upon with such contempt at their banality; she would've given the world to have them back.

Instead, closing her eyes only made it more difficult to open them again. Fatigue had set in with the warmth of the knit shawl Stephanie had draped over her hours before, while Majic had still been sitting with Bagup by the fire, fighting his tears and failing miserably while he'd let out a torrent of crushed furor, looking nearly as gutted by the news as she felt.

The house had since gone silent, only the pop and grumble of burning pine in the hearth and the wet babble of rain. Out the window, long shadows stretched over the wet slosh of brownstone doorsteps beyond the wrought iron gates, naked white branches of elms and birches bent in the wind, still dropping scarlet leaves like losing tickets on the cobbled sidewalks along the frozen canalway where they'd ridden in days before on horseback with Orphen's heartbeat against her ear.

Was he lying somewhere, dying? Was he already dead? Somehow, she'd almost expected to feel it herself if...when...it happened. A sudden lightning bolt, a jarring scream erupting in her subconscious; the punctuation mark that their intimate farewell had so lacked. Instead, all she heard was silence, rain, and soft footsteps creaking down the stairway behind her. She didn't look up while he shuffled up to the nearest armchair and seated himself, fully clothed in his cloak and boots, his voice a hush of tactful sadness in place of the previous bitter rage.

"I know it upsets you," Hartia told her. "I don't know why, but I know you're unhappy about the idea of going after him..."

She didn't turn. She watched the rain. Hartia cleared his throat. Ambrose was standing back on the stair. Some pathetic alliance had been forged between them; the gods knew why.

"We can't...I can't live with this," Hartia reasoned, he was making almost pleading motions with his hands that she couldn't quite see in her peripheral.

"You can't live with it," she spat. "_You_ can't. You're going out there because of what you want. Don't make it sound like you're a hero for it."

Even without looking, she could almost hear the expression on his face. "You don't want him saved?"

"It's not _about _what I want. Or what you want, either. You don't think I'm angry? Every second I think I'm going to wake up and find that none of this is real. Like I dreamed it all or...I've gone crazy and just made it all up. Every time I fall asleep...I don't want to wake up. You don't think...you don't think I've... How much more can I cry about anything, Hartia? He did what he wanted to do; what it would make _sense _he would want to do. Why would Orphen want to die helpless?" She choked on those words. "If we love him..."

"Did you love him?"

Now she couldn't look, not at Haria, not at Ambrose standing there behind him with his look of haughty, self-righteous indignation on his swollen face. "You know I do."

He made some gesture she couldn't see. Maybe a nod. "Then...you can say goodbye like this?"

"Is there ever a good way to say goodbye? Besides..." She pushed out a long breath. "...I might prefer it to watching one of you put him out of his misery. Having to bury him. I don't want that any more than he does."

"But he might be...he could still be treated. You don't think it's worth saving him from his own stupid pride..."

"Pride? What about _respect_? What about what he _wanted_?" She didn't have the energy to argue; she could barely raise her voice.

"Krylancelo and his obstinate..._christ_, what if he didn't even know what he wanted? He wasn't even in his right mind, was he? As soon as he knew he was sick, he didn't even want the shot. It's just his usual contrary response to anything."

"You want to save him for your own piece of mind? Go, then. Do it, Hartia." She twisted toward him. "Don't expect to feel better, whether you can find him or not. Don't think that you're saving him if you do. If it was him telling you, instead of me...would it make any difference?"

Hartia stood from the chair, focused on the floor instead of her, and didn't reply. He stood a moment more before he turned and disappeared through the swinging kitchen door, not turning to look back at her.

"Perhaps it won't make it easier on you," Ambrose finally spoke, stepping off the stair landing, sounding more tired than angry. "He wasn't going to make it."

"Not what you said before." She dragged her heavy gaze back to the window and the lengthening shadows, the afternoon ennui.

"I know what I said. I need Hartia's help, and his offer to enlist mine-"

"So you're giving him hope so you can get what you want. That sounds about right."

"You certainly do love putting words in others' mouths."

"Tell me I'm wrong, then," she shifted in the windowseat slowly, careful not to jostle Majic's head propped against her knee. "You're willing for Hartia to think whatever he wants instead of telling him the truth. He's not coming back. You just want to earn a favor. This isn't any different than your marriage contract."

There was the silence again. The sound of rain while she could feel Ambrose's disdainful stare like insects crawling up her back. She continued brassily, too exhausted to think of it as reckless. "My mother explained it all to me. I don't have any illusions about why you're pressing the issue. Like you said, it's business; it's not about love."

Thoughtfully, he cleared his throat. "Are you...reconsidering?"

"I won't marry someone for business. My mother managed a way to handle the finances alone after my father's death; I won't disappoint her memory. Most of all I won't see all her hard work sunk into the gaping _hole _your father has put in the Farrior estate for the development of a serum that doesn't even work."

He jabbed a finger in the air at Majic, still asleep through their hushed altercation. "This one's father would be in his grave by now if it weren't for the treatment. It can't be helped if your _warlock _was too feeble minded to recognize his own infection! After all, that's what this is about. Not about my father or a mutually beneficial marriage contract you've refused on principles of love and idealism and now some misguided concept of honor. Don't insult me and imply otherwise."

"Don't call him that," she whispered.

"Oh? You'd prefer _dead lover_?"

Every muscle in her back snapped tight, coiled; her instinct asked her to spring at him, claw at his eyes, to draw more blood. She clenched her teeth until her jaw protested and ached, turning her eyes to him, finding the superior lizard-smirk he so often seemed to wear when they argued.

"You insult sorcerers and practically in the same breath ally yourself with one to get what you want. I would prefer you leave me be before I make you bleed a second time in a day."

"And _I _would prefer you would see reason. You needn't worry about him. Should Hartia and I find him alive-as it were-I won't allow him to remain that way. He won't suffer, he won't return here. But if giving his friend a burial will set Hartia's mind right and allow him to help those of us who still have a chance, God's blood, I am going to make it so."

"And I would gift the entirety of the Everlasting Estate to the Kimurak Church before I would marry you."

"You spit on your family's memory two fold, then. Think on it."

"You weren't even trying," she hissed through her teeth. "You weren't even giving him the treatment, were you? He tried to tell me. He tried to say-"

Ambrose curled a lip, folding his arms across his chest. "I can't speak for my father. If it was me, I wouldn't have wasted a vial on him. As it is, having given Hartia a loaded syringe was wasted when he forced it on him. He was already too far gone, you have to know that. You cannot douse a forest fire with a garden pitcher-the infection is the same. His departure saves you all the trouble of euthanizing him later; it protects you. Surprisingly noble, really, for a...well. Easterner."

"Don't pretend you would do the same!" she spat, rousing Majic with the sudden raise in volume. The boy shifted, opened his eyes, breathed in long and slow to orient himself.

With sleep-fogged eyes, he whispered to no one. "Master?"

"No, Maj..." Cleo reached to smooth his hair, but he bent back from her touch, forehead pinched between his blond eyebrows.

"Did you hear...?" he asked her, turning his head to glance at Ambrose, standing over them with his arms still folded across his chest. "Just now...I..."

The kitchen door swung and ejected Hartia, the same strange expression as Majic's written on his brow. He stooped slightly at the window, squinting through the fogged glass while Stephanie appeared at the foot of the stairs with a similar inquisitive worry on her face.

"Did you..." she stammered, her voice abused by tears and trauma. "Did anybody hear...?"

Majic had climbed up from the windowseat, his candleglow hair wild from sleep, scrubbing at one eye while he steered toward the window with Hartia. He threw a glance back at Stephanie.

With her bottom lip pulled between her teeth, Cleo let out a lungful of air. "I didn't hear anything."

No one turned to her. They stood, frozen. Listening like frightened deer. The gaslights sputtered all at once, dimmed, as though hit with a violent gust of silent wind. The house felt darker; colder. Like when a cloud passes over the sun.

Hartia exploded into inexplicable motion, throwing himself back through the kitchen door first, then back out. Stephanie was already moving, slamming the storm shutters closed, turning a little brass key in each with a look of wild, animal fear.

Ambrose had shrunk back them their flurry of action, his arms still folded over his chest while his father called from above on the upstairs catwalk, having emerged from Tim's sickroom. His voice drew closer as he rushed down the staircase, his son craning his neck to get a look.

"Ambrose!" Cleo watched the doctor's eye avoid her entirely, cold and hard while they sought out his son, not bothering to hush his voice once it was clear he had the room's attention. "Your rifle."

"My...?"

"Fetch it fast. You can't let him back in here."

Ambrose's pale countenance held a litany of protests and he stepped back, his visual plea sliding over to the others in his moment of panic.

"Fast, I said!" Dr. Farrior spat at his son, swinging an arm and to send him rushing away into the front parlor. His departure was quickly followed by the mechanical rasp and snap of rounds loading into chambers.

"I'm sorry, Cleopatra. I thought he'd left to unburden you all; it was the best choice he could've made," Farrior bowed to sit on the windowseat beside her, giving a little shake of his head when he finally looked at her, his usually sharp eyes glassy and bloodshot behind his glasses. "We can't trust his health now. That he's even made it...when I saw him from the window, I was...I have to confess, I'm stunned. Please..." He dropped a thick-fingered hand on her shoulder. "Please understand, this is-"

He'd barely gotten the words out before the front door was rocking back hard on its hinges; he was interrupted by the ear-splitting howl of gunpowder and lead. Then a rapid chain of four more, the mechanical clack of the rifle cycling rounds, the bell-like ringing of the spent shells rattling down on the icy steps. With her palms sealed over her ears, knees drawn up, Cleo could not hold the reflexive scream captive in her lungs and it tore free while Hartia and Majic raced past into the front room. Whether they intended to fight or drag the doctor's son back inside, they made no indication. She did not wait to follow; she hauled herself after them through the sitting parlor and into the little foyer-only to be stopped short by the strange tableau framed by the open doorway that had frozen everyone in their steps.

Since the day she'd met him, he'd had a magnetic pull on her eyes. Lean, wolfish and supernaturally beautiful for a man, she could pick him out of a crowd from a furlong away-she'd know him in the dark, blindfolded, and her eyes told her that he was standing there, outside, standing just inside the gate. Soaked to the skin in his mangled clothes and doused in the storm-grayed afternoon light, he trailed a shadow behind him on the ground like a long dark parachute, so deep black in the slanting halflight that it swallowed the terrain behind like a hole, its long arms stretching seemingly far longer than what it shadowed, leaking across the icy cobblestone like the thick seep of a pool of spreading blood.

And it was like looking at a stranger.

The piece of her, whatever it was that knew him, stirred with no recognition. Instead, only an awareness of desolation; the inexplicable feeling of standing at the edge of an abyss. A perception of distance, depth and a resounding emptiness, almost like an echo in her own head, growing louder.

His thousand-yard stare rose painful gooseflesh, turned her stomach in a barrel roll. Here was the alarm, the thunder crash, the soul-splitting scream she'd been waiting for, and it came in crushing silence.

Spilled forward into the ice on one side of the brick walkway, Ambrose's bent body was burning a wet red crater into the piled snow, and without any intent or direction, Cleo's legs were carrying her forward.

ooo...ooo...ooo...ooo

_To be continued..._


	19. Perpetual Motion

**XIX: Perpetual Motion**

It was an image taken out of a nightmare, the most bizarre emotion: this urgent, seam-splitting desire to run toward and away from the same thing. Relief and abject terror at once, and only the liquid thrum of her own heartbeat in her ears, not even the sound of rain. Without permission, her body was carrying her toward the open door, only halted by reaching hands and a clipped word spoken against her ear.

"_No_."

It was Majic. Majic's harassed, stiff voice, his hands pulling her back. His fingertips were bruising, squeezing, holding her back and she realized she'd been fighting him, straining forward, pulling toward the gravitational pull of whatever it was standing in the late afternoon light wearing Orphen's face like an unconvincing mask.

Her urgent, formless prayer in bed that morning had come to life on her lips against every sense of logic she possessed: that he would return, that she would see him again-this hadn't been what she'd meant, not at all. It was that saying from the Academy all over again. How God always answers prayers, His answer being so rarely what was sought.

One day she would learn to stop asking God for anything. Any fool can pray.

"No!" Majic hissed again, his hands tight on both her biceps, he hauled her back with more strength than she would've given him credit for possessing, his face as stark white as clean bedclothes when she turned her head to look at him, blinking with her eyes burning and vision hazed over like a frosted window.

There was a storm of motion, the scrape of chair legs scooting over the wood floor, clattering back, the low thunder of feet pounding on the stairs; up or down, she didn't know. She was barely aware of her own legs carrying her, blindly following the hand that towed her into the dark of the house. Behind her, she heard Hartia's voice raised, a cadence fast and percussive as gunfire made indecipherable by the rush of her own breath, frenzied footfalls and a growing distance. Majic heaved open a heavy door in the dark and pulled it shut behind them, dropping her hand to lay both palms against the door between racks of what looked like small jars. He was murmuring, his voice pinched high into the whistle register, bumbling out an incantation she must have heard before but couldn't place. In the silent spaces between his words, there was Hartia's raised voice and then cacophony. Cleo made fists against her mouth, and between Majic's hands, a thin pearlescent membrane shivered into materiality.

There was a voice that belonged to no one, something oozing through the walls unnaturally, as dripping wet and black as sound cannot be. She pressed her palms to her ears and still it wormed between her fingers, close as a lover's breath, and it rose hot bile in her throat.

There was a blast of splintering wood, cracking mortar or brick, beneath Majic's hands the door rocked under the weight of a projectile, something hurled and smashed against the kitchen wall. Behind the barrier, behind the dam of her hands on her ears, Hartia was shouting. Attacking.

"Majic!" she whispered, crouching down with her hands on the floor, craning her neck to peer under the substantial gap between the door's bottom and the terracotta kitchen tile.

The wet gleam of the boy's eyes swung toward her. He flapped a hand at her in the dark, shushed her with clenched teeth. The door shook a second time, harder with the percussion of flesh and breaking bone. Something blocked the gap under the door, it shifted, groaned. The edge of Hartia's hand came into view in that small space, unfurling and flattening against the ground, straining to push his body back up. They heard him choke out his assailant's name, the name of his long held friend from childhood, the name of a brother.

"Krylancelo..."

The voice that responded-instinctually familiar in the way the smell of wet earth or sting of frigid winter darkness is familiar- did not belong to that brother. It was something less heard than felt.

Hartia did not have the opportunity to respond to it, to resist. There was a tearing, the sound of rending flesh, then the slosh; a torrent of something wet that tracked along the lowlying grout of the tile, creeping swiftly under the door, hot and wet under Cleo's fanned out hands. In the dark she could not discern the color, only the smell. Copper and heat, a smell with sharp edges.

He hadn't even screamed.

Cleo sucked air, swallowed the terrorscream lurching up her gullet like vomit. Her heart thundered and she breathed quick and fast like a rabbit, dizzy with violent nausea, wiping her bloodslick palms compulsively on the thighs of her jeans. In the dark above her, Majic was biting back a sob, audibly shaking like he was holding up a building, fighting to maintain his gossamer thin barrier.

With her eyes screwed shut, there were more gunshots. Three or four; she didn't know. Maybe less, she couldn't count. Didn't count. The pop and bell like jingle of shattering glass. Windows, wineglasses, plates from the cupboards. The explosions played havoc with her equilibrium, throwing her into a tailspin. She gagged, the metal smell of spilled blood filling her nostrils, making her brain ache, her stomach twist.

There was no warning. The door exploded open, splintering from its hinges, rocketing Majic back, the back of his legs crashing into her, sending him backward into the shelves into a salvo of shattering jars and tins. Cleo screeched, shielded her face with one arm while pushing up with her legs to barrel forward blindly out of the debris on a paroxysm of instinct, tumbling end over end with the momentum, spine rolling painfully on the bloody tile, skull knocking hard at impact.

She recalled from nowhere, a preternatural recollection-words from thin air, fished out of her foggy memory. _"...hey, we always think of something…don't we? We'll...figure something out. Things'll be okay."_

When her eyes cleared, in a wash of gaslight, he was standing above her. She focused on him: Orphen, Not Orphen, bleeding with a rapidly closing bullet wound just above his collar bone. He was holding something long and trailing from his hand, and it took a solid second to recognize it as most of Hartia's left arm.

Crumpled nearby, the fallen sorcerer was curled, fetal-positioned in a lake of blood, burgundy-dark and reflective in the lamplight. Inversely, looking down on her with eyes that reflected nothing but only absorbed-eyes she'd once thought beautiful, now dead and glassed over like the eyes of a mounted deer head-the thing that was not Orphen did not move to damage her.

And no longer could she scream, speak, even run. The voice she had heard before, intuitively she knew it like the smell of death, and it addressed her. Gentle as wind, violent as war, penetrative as broken glass, intimate as shared breath. The feel of it in her mind when it focused on her, the voice crept inside her body, every profane syllable like a thrust in the act of lovemaking, the gruesome black thrill impairing her on the floor and wresting away from her any control she might still have over her own limbs and voice. Her eyes rolled back, hearing it speak, though what it said was in no language she could discern or utter, not designed for the tongues of man.

She was scarcely aware of him kneeling, the frigid brush of his fingers on her throat, but it was the lightning shock that followed that reclaimed her attention. A convulsion made from white fire gripped her, clicked her teeth shut hard, snapping her muscles painfully taut, sending the cold fingers back from her throat. The jolt laced around her neck, a blistering heat conducted through her necklace chain, fusing it to her skin, and she was torn from its thrall with a breathless outcry.

It reached again, this time the fingers closing hard on her shoulder, sinking deep with ease, pressing into the flesh like bread dough. Fingernails popped through skin, it craned her upward before it whipped her head sharply into the floor in retaliation, stunning her. Then the fingers on her throat, clawing up to grasp the white hot pendant chain melting itself through her epidermis.

The pendant with the little skyblue gem, the one Hartia had handed over from Childman what felt like a hundred years before in the effort to save Azalie. She had hidden it from Orphen in a selfish attempt to save him from his own ardent, vaguely suicidal determination. It lifted, and the unbearable voltage unleashed across her body again, sending the thing back from her, her consciousness sputtering, tortuous pain erupting over her skin.

She choked aloud, face wet with tears and cold sweat. With a shuddering breath, she whispered for him to take it and finally it sneered at her, pulling her up with hands cold as marble, lifting her sluggish body, her arms swinging listless, head lolling ungainly.

And probably it wasn't, but after everything that had happened, it felt like the most crushed, defeated moment of her life and cruelly, it capitalized on this open vulnerability. In the span of a breath, it read through her, every second of waking life and recalled dreams, every thought and conversation and sight since her mind had began to record memories.

Every breath and pulse and mishap and victory of her short, privileged, desperately lonely life. Every discernable moment and fantasy and ugly word. She lived her last argument with Mariabella, her sister's angry eyes diverted while she slid pins into place around curls. The wounding sentence that slipped off her razor tongue: that if even vapid, vanilla Earl Westerlake found Mariabella acceptably insipid enough to sign the wedding contract; she'd have had to do nothing short of strip bare naked to keep Orphen's attention for longer than a minute.

Mariabella's furrowed brow, her eyes riveted to the curls she was carefully securing. She hadn't even jabbed her scalp. "So you saved me," she'd commented dully, "that embarrassment, I suppose. I'm certain he must find you fascinating, then, little sister."

It wasn't an hour later she was dead. She watched it all again, helpless. She watched her own hand lash out with the knife when the closet opened. She watched herself sentence Orphen to death without even stopping to think, then his struggle and descent into disease while she paid it all no mind; while she mourned her own losses, absolutely absorbed with herself, clinging to him for support through _her _fear. _Her _pain. _Her _suffering.

_I love you. _ That's what she'd told him, and he should've laughed in her face. As though she loved anything or anybody except Cleo, Cleo, Cleo.

With the thing sunk deep, melted into her mind, her stomach roiled at the invasion, everything drawing tight in the anticipation of pain. In return for its plundering of her every fiber, she understood It with pure, indisputable certainty; knew everything it knew. The untappable wealth of moments it had absorbed over millenia and every moment it had read it others, she could see.

It could not be explained in terms of humanity, of thinking people, of anything with regrets or empathy-the cracks of imperfection that rob the race of man of its candidacy for godhood. One cannot explain the drive for stars to burn, the motive for trees to grow, the reasoning behind the tide; cannot fathom or question the perpetual motion of the machinery of the universe.

It was that which darkens, destroys, devours, bringer of decay, that which must exist because existence is. It morphed, shapeless, stalking, a walking plague of ruination, the great nullifier, not something created but something that had always been, called forth into a Nornir necromancer those thousands of winters before by his own sycophants, grown mindlessly zealous and avaricious of their ever expanding command of the great forces. They had sought to undo the confines of death on the world of blood and bone, flesh which ages and must wither and return to the dust. In these endeavors, they were the grand orchestrators of their own extinction.

Its incarceration by the Nornir-too late to save themselves, but in time to delay the demise of their hybrid progeny-was like imprisoning the ocean. It would split containment vessels, swell, create its own path. It could be captured, perhaps, but it could not be held. With patience beyond time and no vengeance but to spread, propagate itself like a cancer. To burn away the final roots of the Nornir that had so unfortunately become tangled with those of mankind, the sons and daughters of Shemhazai. The offspring shall suffer for the sins of the fathers, and the death of a man is of no more consequence than that of a sparrow, a spider, a star.

The Nornir had grown too powerful. _It_ returned them to the dust they had so feared, and would finish its task with the unstoppable insistence of water forcing through a crack, the patience of a tree root crawling one half-millimeter at a time through bedrock. Man, in his deep but foolish curiosity of the world, had simply stumbled into a corner too dark, and opened a door far too heavy to close.

The ocean would find its own path. What had occurred thus far was the trickle, the seep of water in cracks, the rumble of the coming flood.

The necessary path that would unbridling it from its remaining confines, like a river returning to its bed. It had read her, page by page, and knew everything just as she had a staggering glimpse into a truth beyond knowing, her mind deflating and fumbling with its library of contents, all of it slipping like beach sand through fingers while she forgot how to breathe, sucking air like a beached fish in its cradling arms, involuntary muscles freezing up, her blood slowing in her veins.

"Leave..." a voice from the dead speaking, somewhere behind her in the dark. "Leave her..."

There was the bewildering sensation of it retracting, withdrawing from her, her thoughts clearing enough to focus in the direction of the voice. It was Hartia, clawing up on one elbow in the corner, his red hand clutching the remnants of flesh that hung structureless from his shoulder. She squinted, there was a shadow in the doorway behind him. A heavy legged form that lurched forward in a hunkered stance, something gleaming wooden and copper in its hands, a wide gray mustache stretched over the grim line of his mouth. Cleo caught a terrible glance of his face, and Majic's behind him before he pulled the trigger, let the shotgun scream with lead and fire, the muzzle flash searing on her retina and forcing her eyes shut, the blast wrested a reflexive scream from her air starved lungs.

It staggered, standing above her, taking the eruption of lead and fire in its core, and she heard Bagup sob in the ringing aftermath, telling Majic it was the least he could do. That it was what he'd asked Orphen do if he had ever become one of them, the ravenous dead. He was returning the courtesy.

He'd asked Orphen to kill him. To blow him away.

But Bagup did not understand, and It did not fall. It lurched back, its hold on her slipping a moment and she pulled herself backward with her wet palms, her knees working like a listless, dizzy crab to cart her back, away. Bagup fired again when It stood, its hands half blown apart by the hot shrapnel of the shotgun pellets, a tangle of tendons and shattered carpal bones knitting themselves, the scarlet crater in Its torso reshaping in grotesque reverse, remodelling muscle, skin reseaming along the leaking splits, leaving nothing but shredded clothes and the smooth skin of a once coppery, sunbrowned torso that now was pale and bloodless, tracked with the black web of necrotic veins. Wordless, it lashed out at the doorframe with a response to the attack, a black heavy wave made of strange gravity that tore through the mortar, knocking everything back with the violent velocity of a thousand-ton freight train.

Cleo fought to reorient herself, blink against the unforgiving quicksilver of her own rising panic. She braced against the floor, pain radiating from extremities to her head and back again, the wound in her shoulder standing out sharply against the backdrop of misery. She let out a swallowed sob, the sound drowned out when the thing began to speak again, its language melting her to the floor once more, throbbing through her like music: blissful, discordant, hypnotic, intensely erotic, magnificent in the terror it inspired. The Holy Ghost whispering in her ear. Hearing one wrong thing can ruin you forever.

If she could move, she would cross herself.

It was coaxing her. In all its endless power, there was something it couldn't do. It needed her. This was doubtless, reaffirmed by the lingering pain that throbbed across her skin, around her neck like a noose of raw pulsating nerves.

It could not touch the jewel.

"Ignite!" Hartia's voice spoke from a perceived thousand furlongs above from where she had sunk deep, slowly drowning on dry land. The heat swept over her, a screaming curtain of light and sound and she couldn't flinch, only squint. She watched with dazed eyes while that beloved form stood, dead-eyed and bloodless, and opened its mouth, uttering a word aloud that made her eardrums shriek, the wooden framed windows all around blast outward into the wet snow. It was a sound unfit for hearing.

Cleo covered her ears with her palms, both sides wet with blood, a hot trickle running down to a delta at her shirt collar. Her hearing all but obliterated, sight wavering like watching fish swim underwater while she watched Hartia lurch back to his knees, face contorted, she could scarcely make out his next words, despite how he seemed to shout them.

"Confine thee...beast...of the seventh circle."

She'd heard it before. Where, when? A lifetime before, maybe two days. Nothing was clear. Even the image of Hartia pitching forward, vomiting a crimson waterfall, red blossoming over his clothes like blooming roses in fast motion. Orphen-Not Orphen staggered, dropped to one knee, a ravine unzipping him though still he stood, the eruption of arterial blood raining over her but leaving it untroubled as before. She watched the wound seal itself like a river icing over, and in the black blizzard of her memory Orphen was swearing that they didn't bleed. The revenants. He'd destroyed their bodies to the point they could not function, paying no mind to Hartia's livid reprimand of using dangerous incantations to accomplish it.

The story about Komikron, the blood hex. Sacrificing lifeblood for equal damage, force and inertia, cause and effect. Hartia hacking at the other end of his already draining life.

"I behold thee, Shemhazai, frail is your afterbirth!" Another blood hex. Hartia's words were clearer now through the ringing, the hot blood pulse rained from them both, and the voice came again, for the first time intoning in language that could be discerned; invoking that name with bottomless black hatred.

"_Shemhazai_!" it hissed, ten thousand tones all in one. They cowered under the bellowing thunderclap of that word. It was name she had heard before.

Not just in her head, in its thoughts it had forced into her. Years ago, a cold boring day in the Institute.

It was an old story, Nornir-testament apocrypha. Lord Shemhazai who had lusted after a daughter of man, Naamah, bedding her and claiming her as wife. It was Shemhazai and his followers who brought their seed to the womb of humankind, grafting their offspring with the power granted by God to the Nornir Dragon Family. Shemhazai the Betrayer. The Dragon Believers filled this fable with macabre tales of the young sorcerous progeny who devoured the flesh of men and suckled blood, abominations against God, against humanity, formed unholy unions and betrayal. And there were pieces of this story that told of the death of Shemhazai, the crusade against his progeny led by a master of death and his reaping blade: a sword inscribed with the ineffable name of God. The blade that was turned against him, imprisoning him in a living tomb. This deathmaster did not have a name.

It was just a story. Like anything, it was a means to an end. It was like calling the sun a fiery chariot, likening spring and fall to the mourning of a bereaved mother-goddess, the wrath of hell or eternal reward of heaven that made beastial men adhere to societal decency out of deep, ingrained fear. But it rung bells in her aching skull.

She had never linked the two things; one of the Heavenly Ones, old drivel from her school days, the other a story that had dictated the direction of the last few years of her life: Azalie's fate, the transmogrification, the Tower's campaign to bury the truth, the blade with the unreadable runes and the strangest name.

A sword that transformed everything it touched into something else, infused with sleeping malice. According to the dearly departed Rex Rowe, it had become part of a set, this knowledge gleaned from a deep dedication to study of the same apocryphal texts her schooling had merely glanced over as though they were fairy tales.

The sword. A bracelet she had collared around her beloved Reiki's throat until he'd grown too large to wear it. A jewel she wore around her neck.

A jewel she wore around her neck that It could not touch, could not remove.

It explained so much. Why Orphen would leave. Would sacrifice himself, whatever was left of him to sacrifice, to destroy it. It would be so typical of him that he would feel obligated, fated.

Now here he-It-was. And It _bled_. Bled because It-he-was alive. _Because Orphen was alive._

With her throat curdled, strained, parched, her voice rasping like the shear of metal on metal, she forced it out as loud as her vocal chords would allow. She said its name aloud.

"_B-Baltander_!"

Its attention flooded her way, even as the effects of Hartia's blood hex took hold, tearing bleeding wounds into Orphen's body with its deep black shadow burning a hole on the wall behind, too dark to be found in nature, standing still even as the gaslight flickered. When the body moved, it followed a second behind. Skeletal, tall with its billowing cloak, its knobbed arms and fingers long and spidery as tree branches.

And Its eyes, even without eyes, were on her.

The last moment she'd seen her, Mariabella had shut her in a closet. She'd kept her safe by rendering her helpless, binding her to regret and guilt for the rest of the days she could draw breath, however long that would be. She would not sit shaking in the dark, locked in the same ineffable perpetual motion of the universe that could not be questioned, caged by fear and fate while everything else she loved was stripped away, bled drop by drop until death, leaving her alone.

She addressed It, quaking, with her heart squeezing in her throat while she lifted the jewel pendulant from its chain so it could see it plainly in the gaslight.

"I'll take you to the sword."

ooo...ooo...ooo...ooo

_**To be continued...**_


End file.
